CHAPTER ONE

EARLY PORTUGUESE EMIGRATION

TO THE ETHIOPIAN HIGHLANDS:
GEOPOLITICS, MISSIONS AND MÉTISSAGE

ANDREU MARTÍNEZ D’ALÒS-MONER

Portuguese expansion, which achieved momentum in the reigns of

Dom Manuel I (1498-1521) and Dom João III (1521-1558), saw the
foundation of a number of African and Asian port cities subject to the
Lusitanian Crown and also the establishment of several informal
communities across the Orient. These informal communities were not the
product of a deliberate royal policy. They were rather the outcome of
spontaneous colonisations nurtured by the flow of Portuguese – and
European – nationals that went to Africa and Asia following the rise of the
Estado da Índia. Moreover, there were also cases of mixed-race people
who had been in contact in some way or another with the Portuguese and
who adopted a Portuguese identity. Some such Portuguese comunidades
enjoyed only an ephemeral existence, but a few managed to preserve some
form of Portuguese identity for centuries and even up to modern times.
In present-day Senegal, emigrants from Portugal (some of whom were
Jews seeking to escape religious persecution), and who were known as
‘lançados’, settled along the Upper Guinea Coast. Many of them married
women from local communities and by the early sixteenth century the
offspring of these unions, the ‘Portuguese’, as they called themselves,
established themselves at trading centers from the Petite Côte in Senegal
to Sierra Leone in the south. As late as the nineteenth century, there were
still groups on the Petite Côte claiming to be Portuguese though no longer
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 3

using Portuguese Creole as their language.1 In Persia, a company of

arquebusiers enrolled in the army of the Shah Ismail I (1487-1524), and
their descendants lived there for a few generations.2 Also, throughout the
sixteenth century more than 2,000 Portuguese settled in Bengal.3 In south-
east Asia there were also a number of Portuguese comunidades. The
historian Ana Guedes has recalled the interesting story of Portuguese
merchants and mercenaries living in Burma who were active in the
unification of its kingdom under the local ruler Anaukpetlun (died 1628)
and during the independence of Siam.4 In Melaka, 340 years after the
Dutch had captured it from the Portuguese, there was a group of locals still
calling themselves Portuguese. Moreover, up to the nineteenth century
there were a few islands in Indonesia with ‘Portuguese’ minorities: Flores,
Adonara, Solor, and Timor.5
A less well-known case of Portuguese diaspora was the community
that lived in the Ethiopian highlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The roots of this group go back to the early 1540s and survived
as a distinct community until the second half of the next century. A large
part of the Portuguese were occupied in military roles, as members of the
army of the Christian negus.6 In Ethiopia, the Portuguese were known as

1
Peter Mark, ‘Portuguese’ Style and Luso-African identity. Precolonial Senegambia,
Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 2002,
13, 28.
2
Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, Os descobrimentos e a economia mundial, vol. 3,
Lisboa: Presença, 1982 (1963-71), 123.
3
Francisco Rodrigues da Silveira, Reformação da milicia e governo do Estado da
India Oriental (British Library, Additional Manuscripts: Portuguese, Ms. n.
25:412), quoted in George D. Winius, The Black Legend of Portuguese India.
Diogo do Couto, His Contemporaries and the Soldado Prático. A Contribution to
the Study of Political Corruption in the Empires of Early Modern Europe, New
Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1985, 45.
4
M. Ana de Barros Serra Marques Guedes, Interferência e integração dos
portugueses na Birmánia, ca. 1580-1630, Lisboa: Universidade de Lisboa, 1991,
27.
5
Ronald Daus, Portuguese Eurasian Communities in Southeast Asia, Singapore:
Inst. of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989, 2.
6
The state for which the Portuguese fought was ruled by the Solomonid dynasty.
The foundation of this dynasty is attributed to Yekuno Amlak (1270-85) and the
last Solomonid ruler was Haile Sellasie I (1930-1974). The Solomonid name stems
from the fact that the Ethiopian rulers were traditionally believed to be descendants
of Solomon, King of Israel, and Makedda, the Queen of Sheba. See Carlo Conti
Rossini, “La caduta della dinastia Zagué e la versione amarica del BeŸela Nagast”,
Rendiconti della Reale Academia dei Lincei, Classe di scienze morali, storiche e
filologiche ser. 5a, vol. 31, fasc. 7-10, 1922, 279–314.
4 Chapter One

Burtukan or simply as Ferenj (from ‘Frank’) and during more than 130
years preserved a Portuguese identity. Some of them spoke the Portuguese
language, practiced Catholic cults and used Portuguese names. Historical
sources reporting on this group are relatively abundant, but they have been
little used to date. With this study, I will draw on Portuguese and Ethiopian
sources and reconstruct the dynamics of this Portuguese diaspora. The
genesis and development of this group will be addressed as well as issues
concerning their identity and integration into Ethiopian societies. An
important focus will be the relationship between this foreign group and the
Jesuit mission, active in Ethiopia from 1556 to 1632.

The Portuguese and the Ethiopian Kingdom

in the sixteenth century
The Portuguese were not the first foreigners to settle in the Ethiopian
highlands. The Ethiopian and Coptic Churches had since early date strong
ties and it was the See of Alexandria which nominated the abun, the
official head of the Ethiopic Church. From this it is reasonable to infer the
permanent presence of Coptic ecclesiastics at the Ethiopian court.
Moreover, the presence of lay foreigners such as Egyptian Copts,
Armenians and probably Arabs at the courts of different Solomonid rulers
is amply attested since the fourteenth century.7 In the fifteenth century, as
a consequence of an increase in the diplomatic contacts between Christian
Ethiopia and European powers, an important number of Europeans were
reported to be living in Ethiopia. A large number of the Europeans who
settled in Christian Ethiopia were Italians and some enjoyed influential
roles at the royal court.8 Thus in 1450 the Sicilian Pietro Rombolo was

7
On the earlier foreign policy of the Solomonid state, see Taddesse Tamrat,
Church and state in Ethiopia: 1270-1527, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. An
Arabic source has it that negus Yeshaq (1414-1429) had in his court Coptic
officials who were to help him reforming the army and administration, see Ibn Fadl
Allah al-Omari, Masalik el absar fi mamalik el amsar. L'Afrique moins l'Egypte
[14th century] ed., tr. Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1927, 36-37.
8
The most complete summary on the foreign – mainly Italian – presence in
Ethiopia up to the sixteenth century remains Renato Lefèvre’s `Riflessi etiopici
nella cultura europea del Medioevo e del Rinascimento (Parte I)’, Annali
Lateranensi 8, 1944, 9-89; idem (Parte II), Annali Lateranensi 9, 1945, 331-444;
idem (Parte III), 11, 1947, 255-342. A valuable up-to-date survey is Gianfranco
Fiaccadori, `Venezia, l’Europa e l’Etiopia’, in: Giuseppe Barbieri & Gianfranco
Fiaccadori (eds.), Nigra sum sed formosa. Sacro e bellezza dell’Etiopia cristiana
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 5

sent by Zära Yaeqob (1434-1468) to meet Alfonso V of Aragon to request

artists and craftsmen and three decades later Giovanni Battista Brocchi da
Imola took on the same role as Ethiopian envoy in Rome.9
Towards the beginning of the sixteenth century, with the build up of
their dominion in the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese began to replace the
Italians as the first European group in Ethiopia. In ca. 1500, an envoy of
Dom João II, Pero da Covilhã, arrived at the court of negus Naod (1494-
1508). Covilhã settled in the country, received lands and eventually stayed
there until his death towards 1530.10 By 1508, Afonso de Albuquerque had
landed two other Portuguese envoys, João Gomes and João Sanchez, on
the Ethiopian shore; the outcome of their mission, however, remains
obscure.11
Soon thereafter, a period of a few decades ensued during which the
Portuguese achieved a fragile control of the waters of the Arabian
Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. From India convoys were sent yearly to
the mouth of the Red Sea to patrol the area and block the trade route that
through the Red Sea connected the Mediterranean with the Indian ports.12
The Portuguese were able to maintain this system in function for a few
decades until it ceased in the 1550s but for a few sporadic visits.13 In 1520,

(Venezia, Ca’ Foscari, 13 marzo–10 maggio 2009), Vicenza: Terra Ferma, 2009,
(26), 27-48.
9
Renato Lefèvre, `Riflessi etiopici’, Annali Lateranensi 9, 1945, 388-89, 407–44.
10
On Covilhã’s trip, see Conde de Ficalho, Viagens de Pêro da Covilhã, Portugal:
Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1989.
11
See Damião de Góis, Chronica do Feliçissimo rei dom Manuel [1566], Coimbra:
Imprensa da Universidade, 1954, parte III, ch. lix; and Armando Cortesão,
Esparsos, Coimbra: Imprensa de Coimbra, 1974, 25, 77-81.
12
On this point, see Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, `In the Company of Iyäsus:
the Jesuit Mission in Ethiopia, 1557-1632’, PhD thesis, European University
Institute, Florence, 2008, 11.
13
The abandonment of the patrols to the Red Sea was grounded on practical and
geopolitical factors. On the one hand, this policy was a costly enterprise that
overstrained the Indian treasury. On the other hand, after the failed sieges of Diu of
1538 and the Portuguese attack on Suez three years later, the relations between the
Ottomans and Portuguese somehow improved. The two powers reached an
unofficial truce wherein each would respect its newly-acquired possessions: the
Portuguese were granted free hand in India and the Ottomans full control of the
Red Sea. On the failed siege of Diu of 1538, it is worth recalling the study of
Dejanirah Couto, `Les Ottomans et l’Inde Portugaise’, in: Congrès International
Vasco da Gama et l’Inde, vol. I, Lisbonne-Paris: Fondation Gulbenkian, 1999,
181-200. Significantly, the loss of control of the Red and Arabian Seas by the
Portuguese revitalized the old trade route between Venice and India that crossed
the Red Sea. See Godinho, Os descobrimentos e a economia mundial, vol. 3, 132-
6 Chapter One

the armada sent to patrol the Red Sea called off Massawa, then the main
port connecting the Red Sea with the Ethiopian highlands, and landed an
embassy of Dom Manuel I to the Ethiopian negus.14 The embassy was
headed by the fidalgo Rodrigo da Lima and comprised eight other
Portuguese officials. Towards the end of 1520, the Portuguese group met
with negus Lebnä Dengel at Taguelat and, due to the difficult
communications with India, could only leave for Europe in 1526. Beyond
strengthening the ties between the two distant lands, the embassy also
resulted in a fine account of Ethiopia written by the Portuguese chaplain
Francisco Alvares.15
The next important chapter of Ethio-Portuguese contacts focused on
one of the members of da Lima’s embassy, the physician João Bermudez,
who with the painter Lázaro de Andrade remained in the company of the
negus after the Portuguese entourage had left. Bermudez became a major
player in the later settlement of the Portuguese group in Ethiopia. The
physician soon gained the trust of the negus and in the early 1630s would
have been sent as the ambassador of the Solomonids to Europe. Although
this episode remains still obscure, by dispatching Bermudez to Europe
Lebnä Dengel probably wanted to request military help from his European
allies in a moment when his kingdom was suffering a devastating djihad
from the neighbouring sultanate of Adal.16 In 1535, Bermudez arrived in
Europe where he claimed to have been appointed as Patriarch of Ethiopia.
In all truth, the Portuguese court was suspicious of him and he thus could

33; and Frederic C. Lane, `The Mediterranean Spice Trade: Its Revival in the
Sixteenth Century’, in: Idem, Venice and History. The collected papers of Frederic
C. Lane, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966, 25-34.
14
On Dom Manuel’s policies in the Red Sea and Ethiopia see Jean Aubin, `Duarte
Galvão’, in Aubin, Le latin et l'astrolabe: Recherches sur le Portugal de la
Renaissance, son expansion en Asie et les relations internationales, Lisbonne-
Paris: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 1996, 11-48; Luis Filipe Thomaz,
`L’idée impériale manuéline’, in: Jean Aubin (ed.), La découverte, le Portugal et
l’Europe. Actes du colloque célébré à Paris le 26, 27 et 28 mai 1988, Paris:
Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, 1990, 35-103.
15
Francisco Alvares, Verdadeira informção das terras do Preste João [1540],
Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1889. A valuable study of Alvares’s account and its
impact in Portugal is Jean Aubin, `Le prêtre Jean devant la censure portugaise’,
Bulletin des Études Portugaises et Brésiliennes 41, 1980, 33-57.
16
On the figure of Bermudez, see Marius Chaine, `Bermudez, patriarche de
l’Ethiopie’, Revue de l’orient chrétien 4, 14, 1909, 321-29; and Francisco
Rodrigues, `Mestre João Bermudes’, Revista de História 3, 1919, 119-37.
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 7

not attain recognition of his Patriarchal claims.17 This notwithstanding, his

embassy had an impact in Portugal and on Portuguese policies in the
Orient. Indeed, far from being removed from office, the “Patriarch” was
included in the armada to India from 1538 led by the newly-appointed
governor Dom Garcia de Noronha. Bermudez then stayed in Goa for about
two years during which time we may assume he became one of the main
advocates for sending an expeditionary force to the Red Sea and Ethiopia.18
In 1541, spurred by Bermudez and by the fresh news that came from
Ethiopia recounting the effects of the djihad of Ahmad Grañ, the decision-
makers in Goa decided to send a major armada to the Red Sea. The
armada was captained by the newly-appointed governor of India Estevão
da Gama, who had just replaced the inefficent Noronha. According to
Gaspar Correa, the armada comprised 77 minor ships (fustas e catures), 3
galiots (galeotas) and 12 major ships carrying artillery and more than
2,000 oarsmen.19 Bermudez sailed aboard one of its flagships. The main
objective of the expedition was to destroy the Ottoman fleet at Suez,
which had become the major challenger to Portuguese supremacy in Asian
waters and to go in rescue of the Ethiopian ‘ally’.

17
On suspicions by the Portuguese monarch regarding Bermudez’ nomination to
the Ethiopian Patriarchate, see Francisco Rodrigues, `Mestre João Bermudes’, 123.
The Holy Roman Emperor was also sceptical about the Patriarch; see Georg
Schurhammer, Die Zeitgenössischen Quellen zur Geschichte Portugiesisch-Asiens
und seiner Nachbarländer (..), Rome: Institutum Historicum S. I., 1962, doc. 195.
18
Shortly before his death in 1570, Bermudez published a personal account of his
wanderings. Although the statements therein found have to be taken with much
caution, the narrative is a valuable and informative source on the period under
scrutiny. In the book, Bermudez attributed himself important commitments. He
thus informed that: `already when I was in Portugal the king gave me all his
authority so that I could provide of everything and I could take all the necessary
craftsmen under my service’ (porque ja em Portugal me fizera el Rey merce de
com sua autoridade prover todos os officios necessarios pera a gouernança da
gente que levasse commigo); João Bermudez, Breve relação da embaixada que o
Patriarcha D. João Bermudez trouxe do Imperador da Ethiopia vulgarmente
chamado Preste João dirigida a el-Rei D. Sebastião, Lisboa: Typographia da
Academia, 1875 (1565), ch. 10.
19
Gaspar Correia, Lendas da India, vol. IV, Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1976
(facsimile repr. of Lisboa: Typographia da Academia Real das Sciencias, 1864),
161-63. Couto provides different numbers for the composition of the armada:
Diogo do Couto, Da Asia, Lisboa: Regia Officina Typografica, 1777, Década V,
liv. VII, cap. V.
8 Chapter One

In January 1541, the Portuguese expedition called at Massawa and

contacted the Christian baher nagash Yeshaq.20 Yeshaq informed the
Portuguese of the progress of the djihad conducted by Ahmad Grañ and,
responding to it, the Portuguese constituted in July a company of 400
soldiers that should go to support the Christian cause. Although a review
of the Portuguese involvement in the Ethiopian campaigns is beyond the
scope of this paper, it deserves to be remarked that the intervention of the
Portuguese was decisive. Over two years the Portuguese faced the enemy
in at least four major encounters, liberated a number of strategic locations
and ultimately contributed to the decisive annihilation of Ahmad Grañ’s
army at Wayna Dega on 21 February 1543. It was as a result of these
experiences that most of the survivors of the campaigns decided to settle
in Ethiopia.

The formation of a mixed race group

The Portuguese soldiers paid a heavy toll during the two years of
combat. Reportedly, more than half of them died. However, their prowess,
commitment and their military skills earned them a reputation and the
admiration of the negus. The rewards promised them by the Ethiopian
state, the possibility of marriage to local wives and the hardships of a
mercenary life that would await them back in India convinced most of
them to settle down.21 Of the some 170 survivors about 120 stayed in
Ethiopia and towards 1544 some fifty soldiers went back to India. One of
the soldiers who left, the arquebusier Miguel de Castanhoso, would write,
once in Portugal, an account of the military expedition.22 Another group of

20
Baher nägash means literally ‘ruler of the sea’ (provinces) and was the title of
the semi-independent lord based in the provinces of Tegray and Hamasen and
formally subject to the Christian negus.
21
The Portuguese troop that went to India with Estevão da Gama at its departure
from India was mostly formed of young soldiers, probably in their 20s and 30s,
and of a few fidalgos; the young age of many and the attraction for the Preste John
might have been two important factors pushing many of them to volunteer for the
Ethiopian campaigns and, later on, to settle in the African land. For the
composition of the armada to the Red Sea I rely on Correia, Lendas da India, vol.
IV, 161.
22
In Portugal Castanhoso received a pension from the crown and wrote a valuable
account of the military expedition in Ethiopia, the above-mentioned Dos Feitos de
D. Christovam da Gama em Ethiopia, first published in 1564. After the settlement
of Christovão’s soldiers, a few more Portuguese or foreigners might have settled in
Ethiopia but these did not number more than a few dozens at the maximum.
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 9

soldiers reportedly left some fifteen years later, when Viceroy Dom
Constantino de Bragança (1558-1561) was in power.23
The Portuguese who stayed had a simple but challenging role to fulfil
for the Ethiopian Christian state: to defend it. As the campaigns against
Ahmad Grañ had shown, the Portuguese had arrived at a moment of
extreme weakness for the Solomonid state. From about 1528 to the arrival
of the Portuguese, the Muslim army marched uncontested across most of
Christian Ethiopia, destroying churches, plundering riches and sowing
chaos. The worries of the Christian state, however, were not limited to the
djihadic outburst waged by Somali and Afar warriors, which after all
proved to be a temporary episode.24 The rise in power of the Solomonid
state in the fifteenth century went hand in hand with that of its Muslim
neighbours and a consequence of it was that de facto it was landlocked.
The Christians did not have direct contact with the sea and were hence
unable to upgrade their military and technical capacities. This handicap
became critical when the military revolution that had its epicentre in
Europe reached the Indian Ocean and the Muslim world in the early
sixteenth century.25 Whilst contact with the Mamluk, and later Ottoman
states guaranteed Ethiopia’s Muslim rivals easy grasp of modern
weaponry and military skills,26 the Solomonid monarchy could not rely on

Reportedly, Bishop Andrés de Oviedo and his five Jesuit companions arrived in
Ethiopia accompanied with a few Portuguese laymen.
23
Castanhoso left for India with a few dozen (Couto says about fifty) soldiers on
16 February 1544 in a fusta of Diogo de Reinoso. Castanhoso, História das cousas,
ch. 28, 29; Couto, Década V, liv. IX, ch. IV; Diogo do Couto , Tratado dos feitos
de Vasco de Gama e seus filhos na India, ed. J. M. Azevedo-J.M. dos Santos,
Lisboa: Cosmos, 1998 (ca. 1610), 180; Bermudez, Breve relação da embaixada,
ch. XLVIII.
24
The djihad was indeed as devastating as short-lived. The Christian Ethiopian
`Short Chronicle’ described it, not without exaggeration, as having ended `like the
smoke and the ash of an oven’, René Basset (ed. & tr.), Études sur l'Histoire
d'Éthiopie. Première Partie: Chronique Éthiopienne, Paris: Imprimerie Nationale,
1882, 112.
25
On this issue, see Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation
and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press,
1988.
26
Mamluks and Ottomans were the chief suppliers of modern weaponry to the
Muslim sultanates in the Horn of Africa. The Mamluks ruled in Egypt from 1250
to 1517, during which period they were also the major force in the Red Sea. On
their military structure and power, see William J. Hamblin, `Egypt: Mamluk
Dynasty (1250-1517): Army and Iqta’ System’, in: Kevin Shillington (ed.),
Encyclopedia of African history, New York [u.a.]: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005, 444-46;
James Waterson, The Knights Of Islam: The Wars of the Mamluks, Greenhill
10 Chapter One

receiving help from any ally at close reach. The Portuguese thus came to
occupy a much needed role. This might explain their rapid integration
within the state structure and the important roles that, given their scarce
numbers, they were destined to play in the forthcoming decades.
As soon as the campaigns against Ahmad Grañ were over, the
Portuguese soldiers reportedly formed a sort of elite unit in the service of
the negus. Bermudez reports that negus Gälawdewos (1540-1559) “had
ordered the Portuguese to protect him and follow him wherever he went to
with two squadrons.”27 In 1555, when the Jesuit mestre Gonçalo went to
meet the negus in the province of Gurage, he found 93 Portuguese under
the command of Captain Gaspar de Sousa at the court.28 During the same
period, names such as Afonso de França Moniz, Diogo de Alvelos da
Azinhaga, Simão do Several, and Alvaro da Costa de Covilhão are
mentioned as important soldiers of the guard of Gälawdewos.29
For their upkeep, the Ethio-Portuguese were given lands and received a
payment from the Ethiopian state. Thus, when in 1557 the Jesuit Andrés

Books, London, 2007; Kenneth Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 100-07; and especially the
extraordinary work David Ayalon, Gunpowder and firearms in the Mamluk
Kingdom: a challenge to a mediaeval society, London [u.a.]: Cass, 1978. The
decay of the Mamluks, partly accelerated by the Portuguese blockade of the Red
Sea trade route, was sealed with the Ottoman invasion under sultan Selim I.
Selim’s successor, Suleiman I the Magnificent, intensified Ottoman control of the
Red Sea, with the occupation of the strategic ports of Massawa, Sawakin, Mokha
and Aden and also supported the Muslims Adal. In 1542, the basha of Zabid sent a
company of Arab and Turkish mercenaries armed of firearms to Ethiopia to
combat the Portuguese. Moreover, it must be emphasized that the arms’ traffic in
the region involved more surprising actors, such as Europeans. João de Barros, for
instance, informed that in the 1510s a Catalan ship called at Zeila, one of the
principal ports of the Muslim sultanate of Adal, to sell weapons; Barros, Da Asia,
Lisboa: Regia Officina Typografica, 1777, Década III, parte I, cap. V. In addition,
although I could not find evidence thereto, the Venetians might have been involved
in that trade thus seeking to empower the regional enemies of the Portuguese and
thus break their blockade of Red Sea trade, so harmful in the sixteenth century to
Venetian interests. As a matter of fact, Venetian craftsmen and agents participated
as technical advisers in the Ottoman navy; see István Ráckóczi, `Adem turca e Diu
portuguesa num documento de 1538’, in: Artur Teodoro de Matos & Luís Filipe F.
Reis Thomaz (eds.), A Carreira da Índia e as Rotas dos Estreitos: Actas, Fundação
Oriente, 1998, 527-50, 523 note 16.
27
… Ordenara que os portugueses o guardassem e andassem sempre junto delle
em dous esquadroes; Bermudez, Breve relação da embaixada, ch. XLIV.
28
Couto, Da Asia, Década VII, liv. I, ch. VIII.
29
Couto, Da Asia, Década VII, liv. IV, ch. XI.
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 11

de Oviedo went to meet Gälawdewos, the latter ordered a golden mark to

be given to the Bishop and an ounce to every Portuguese soldier and
servant, a quantity that was held “more than sufficient in view of the cheap
prices in the land”.30 Moreover, a few members of the Portuguese group
were described as wealthy and with large estates. One Francisco de
Magalhães was said to have received lands somewhere near the region of
Gafat and the chronicler stressed that with the other Portuguese the same
was true.31
The two decades that ensued after the death of Ahmad Grañ were
crucial for the Ethiopian state. On the one hand, the death of the Muslim
leader had not appeased the Muslim neighbours in Adal and under Nur bin
Mujahid of Adal the clashes between the Christians and Adalites found
renewed vigour. On the other hand, the Oromo tribes began their
expansion northwards in the 1540s. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume
that throughout the same period the Portuguese militia was busy and
historical sources would support this view. Indeed, shortly after the battle
of Wäyna Daga the Portuguese militia contributed to recapture the fortress
of Däbrä Seyon in Gäralta32 and in 1544 they were probably involved in
Gälawdewos’s recovery of the southern province of Däwaro, where a few
of them thereafter settled.33
For a few more years sources are silent on the fate of the Ethio-
Portuguese. Be it as it may, the northern push of the Oromo tribe thwarted
any optimistic projects Gälawdewos and the Portuguese guard might have
hosted. In ca. 1555, the Portuguese militia was reported to have waged a
campaign against the Oromo in the Bali region and in March 1559 eighteen
of them died in the battle against the company of Mälasay of Nur bin
Mujahid of Adal, where Gälawdewos eventually also perished.34 The
Däwaro province was again lost to the Oromo during the Bifole gada

30
`E posto que o Bispo fora sempre bem provido, mandou El Rey, depois que veio,
que lhe dessem hum marco de ouro cada mez pera sua pessoa, e pera cada soldado,
e criado seu huma onça, porção muito bastante pera a barateza da terra’, Couto, Da
Asia, Década VII, liv. VII, ch. IV.
31
Bermudez, who informed on this detail, said that Francisco de Magalhães ‘vinha
de ver humas terras, que lhe elrey tinha dado: porque a todos os portugueses daua
terra de cujas rendas se manteuessem.’ Bermudez, Breve relação da embaixada,
ch. XLIV; also Couto, Da Asia, Década VII, liv. IV, cap. XI.
32
Bermudez, Breve relação da embaixada, ch. XXXVII.
33
Bermudez, Breve relação da embaixada, ch. XLVII; and ch. XLIII.
34
Camillo Beccari (ed.), Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales inediti a
saeculo XVI ad XIX, 15 vols., Romae: C. de Luigi, 1902-17 (henceforth RASO),
vol. X, 151; Couto, Da Asia, Década VII, liv. VII, ch. IV, and ch. VI.
12 Chapter One

(1546-54)35 and for the Portuguese this setback marked the beginning of a
period of wandering that is difficult to track accurately in the sources.
Initially, they would have resettled in Damot, then they moved to Gojjam
and eventually, in the 1560s or 1570s, the larger groups would have taken
a more permanent seat in areas to the north, around the Lake Tana and in
Fremona, Tegray.36
The settlement in Tegray became eventually the most important of the
Ethio-Portuguese. Its foundation is associated with a political crisis that
occurred during the rule of negus Minas (1559-1563) when the association
between the Portuguese and the negus broke. Fervently anti-Catholic, the
son of Gälawdewos abolished all the favorable decisions of his father
concerning the Ethio-Portuguese and also imposed a hard hand towards
the Jesuit missionaries who were active in his lands since 1557. His
actions provoked a split in the foreign group. A large group joined the
short-lived rebelion of Ozdemir Pasha and baher-nagash Yeshay in
Tegray.37 Another group of Portuguese soldiers, headed by one Affonso de
França, remained nevertheless loyal to the negus. In the late 1550s, the
group from the north was living in Debarwa and when the rebellion of
Yeshaq and Ozdemir Pasha was over they settled with the Jesuit
missionaries in the Adwa plateau at a site called Fremona, where Yeshaq
had given them a gwelt (i.e. rights of cultivation and taxation over the
land).38 Henceforth, Fremona was to be associated with the missionaries
and the Ethio-Portuguese for the next hundred years. Shortly after its
foundation, the village was reported to already have about 250 people. In
the seventeenth century, it was there that the largest number of Catholics
and Portuguese were concentrated and in the years to come it became the
main point connecting the southern Jesuit residences with the coast.
It was amidst this troubled period that the Ethio-Portuguese group took
shape. The Portuguese soldiers mixed with local women, who bore them
mixed-race offspring. The historian Diogo do Couto reports that in 1555

35
Mohammed Hassen, The Oromo of Ethiopia: a history 1570-1860, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990, 24.
36
Bermudez, Breve relação da embaixada, ch. XLVI.
37
Couto, Da Asia, Década VII, liv. VII, ch. XII; VII, liv. VIII, ch. IX; VII, liv. X,
ch. VI. After his failed first attempt to challenge central power baher nägash
Yeshaq remained quiet for some years until he resumed his rebelion against central
Ethiopian rule in the 1570s. Then the army of Särsä Dengel proved superior and he
was killed in battle; see Carlo Conti-Rossini, ‘La guerra turco-abissina del 1578’,
Oriente moderno, 1, 1921, 634-36, 684-91; 2, 1923, 48-57.
38
RASO X, 207; RASO XI, 292, 230; Couto, Da Asia, Década VII, liv. VII, ch.
XII; RASO V, 463; Bermudez, Breve relação da embaixada, ch. LVIII.
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 13

there were already about 1,200 “Portuguese” in Ethiopia.39 The group

comprised the ageing veterans of the 1540s campaigns, their wives and
children and probably a few Europeans as well, who henceforth would be
also identified as “Portuguese” by the local people or in the sources. In
1598, the group grew to reach about 3,000 members and in the ensuing
decades of the seventeenth century, depending on which different clusters
of “Portuguese” were taken into account, their number oscillated from a
minimum of 1,000 to a maximum of 3,000 members.40 Such numbers
remained steady until the group disappears from the historical record
around 1667.

The Jesuit mission and the making of a Portuguese

Catholic group
The fact that the Ethio-Portuguese were defined as “Portuguese” in
contemporary sources and perceived as different by the locals emphasizes
their distinct Portuguese identity. The question that arises is what was this
identity based on? How different were in actuality the Ethio-Portuguese
from their Amhara, Agäw and Tegreñña neighbours, to name just the three
most important groups among whom the foreigners lived?
An important feature of the Ethio-Portuguese that may have affected
the way they were perceived locally was the fact they were considered
Portuguese “citizens”. Indeed, the Portuguese king took under his
patronage the Ethio-Portuguese in Ethiopia. This gave the Ethio-Portuguese
the feeling of belonging to the once mighty nation. Moreover, the interest
of the Portuguese king had some practical consequences. On the one hand,
the Catholics in Ethiopia became a matter of concern at the Portuguese
court in the 1550s. Indeed, it was officially to minister to them that the
crown decided to send Jesuit missionaries to Ethiopia. More importantly,
beginning from Dom João III until the period of the Spanish Felipes, the
Portuguese Crown allocated a subsidy for its subjects in Ethiopia.
Although the subsidy, which the sources call esmola, i.e. ‘alms’, was
never extraordinary and problems with it reaching its destinataries were
frequent, it showed the true commitment of Portugal towards this African

39
Couto based his information in meetings he had in Goa with members of
Portuguese families – one Simão Fernandes and one Diogo Dias – who had come
from Ethiopia during the rule of Viceroy Constantino de Bragança; Couto, Da
Asia, Década V, liv. IX, ch. IV ; and Id., Tratado dos feitos, 180. See also
Bermudez, Breve relação da embaixada, ch. XLVIII.
40
See for instance, RASO XI, 143, 382.
14 Chapter One

diaspora. Around 1555, a Portuguese staying in the Red Sea port of

Arquico is reported. He was supposed to forward the contributions (pera
arrecadar as rendas) sent from India for the Ethio-Portuguese.41 Further
references to this subsidy appear only towards the end of the century,
when communications between Portuguese India and the Red Sea might
have improved. In the successive decades, payments, which oscillated
between 200 and 500 pardãos, became more regular and constituted the
main source of income of the Ethio-Portuguese.42
In Ethiopia, the Portuguese soldiers and their offspring appear to have
enjoyed a special status, too. As indicated above, they were allotted states
by Gälawdewos and a few Portuguese became landowners. Moreover,
they had the right to practice their faith. At the conclusion of the wars with
Ahmad Grañ, “Patriarch” Bermudez was allowed to stay in Ethiopia as
“Patriarch of the Portuguese” and during his residence at Debarwa from
about 1554 to 1556 he celebrated mass for his flock at the church of
“Nossa Senhora”.43 Moreover, somewhere after 1558, Pero Leão, a fidalgo
and the arquebusier who had killed the Muslim leader Ahmad Grañ in
1543, was reported to have built a monolithic church (de roca viva) in the
region of “Decono”.44 The church was meant to be used by the Jesuit
bishop and the Catholic group. Besides, the Portuguese also enjoyed the
privilege of being ruled under Portuguese laws. During the short reign of
Gälawdewos’s successor, Minas,45 these privileges seem to have been

41
RASO X, 13, 51.
42
In 1595, the Crown sent them 200 pardãos (60,000 reis); RASO X, 401. In the
successive years, the sum seems to have reached, with a few exceptions, Ethiopia
on a yearly basis; see RASO VII, 19; RASO XII, 244, 312, 319.
43
The bombastic title of `Patriarch of the Portuguese’ should be seen as just
another fabrication of the enigmatic Bermudez. It still indicates, however, that the
Portuguese had the right to their own spiritual leader; Bermudez, Breve relação da
embaixada, chs. XLVI, LV and LVI.
44
On Leão’s earlier military feats, see Bermudez, Breve relação da embaixada,
XXXIV. On him settling in Ethiopia and erecting a church there, Couto, Da Asia,
Década VII, liv. VII, ch. V and Década VII, liv. VII, ch. VI. The exact location of
“Decono” remains uncertain. There are at least two places with a similar spelling:
Dekhana in the province of Dämbeya and Dähono, another name for the port of
Hergigo (Arquico in Portuguese sources). Significantly, in both places there was at
some point a Portuguese presence, but no rock-hewn church has been found. A site
more distant phonetically to Decono but more fitting to the description provided by
Leão would be Degum in Gäralta. Degum indeed possesses an important complex
of rock-hewn churches.
45
RASO X, 86, 151, 278.
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 15

suspended but they were ratified later by two influential rulers, Särsä
Dengel (1563–1597) and Susenyos (1607-1632).46
The Portuguese in Ethiopia, for their part, managed to preserve their
“European” identity. Although by the 1570s, considering the dominant
black phenotype, any Portuguese traits might have been erased from the
younger generations, the group continued to be perceived as different
within the wider Ethiopian society until the next century. Moreover,
sources indicate that the Portuguese had a sense of pride regarding their
origin. A set of factors may explain this trend. Firstly, in the sixteenth
century Portugal enjoyed of a widespread prestige in Asia and parts of
Africa. As occurred with similar mixed-race groups that had originated
overseas, being a Portuguese meant belonging to a powerful nation; it
reinforced one’s symbolic position within the local society. The Ethio-
Portuguese shared the same living conditions of their contemporary
Ethiopians, and Jesuit sources often emphasize the destitution in which
most of them lived; yet their Portuguese background surely granted them a
special status. Indeed, in the seventeenth century and largely thanks to the
mediation of the Jesuit missionaries, belonging to this group was a
shortcut for social promotion.
The feature that perhaps most clearly emphasized the Portuguese
identity of this group was the preservation of their homeland’s system of
naming. Hence, of the 69 “Portuguese” born in Ethiopia which I could
identify in the historical record, only eight bear non-Portuguese names.
For the record, the most popular names were António (eight occurrences)
and Manoel (four occurrences). There may be room to speculate about
such preferences. António may have been a payment of homage of the
patron saint of Lisbon, and Manoel was perhaps a way for the Ethio-
Portuguese to recall the Portuguese king who had most strongly pushed
the Ethiopian agenda in Portugal.
Religion also served as an important marker of their distinct identity.
However, here the cut might not have been that clear. The Ethiopians
among whom the Portuguese lived were Christian Orthodox and initially
many Portuguese might have simply adopted the Christian rituals and
beliefs of their neighbours. In their beginnings, there was after all no
Catholic priest who could minister to them. Circumcision, for instance, a
practice common in many societies of the region, including amongst the

46
Both Särsa Dengel and Susenyos protected the Ethio-Portuguese group and it is
no surprise that their rule represents the most prosperous period for the Burtukan.
A few Ethio-Portuguese really thrived during this period. For example, we learn of
one Jorge Nogueira who lived in `Nanina’ (Agäw Meder), where Särsä Dengel
would have granted him lands; RASO V, 469.
16 Chapter One

Christian Amharas and the Tegreñña speakers, seems to have been widely
practiced amongst the Ethio-Portuguese from the beginning.47 With regard
to the Portuguese language we must accept a similar acculturation: the
adoption of the local languages must be taken for granted.
The opening of the Jesuit mission in 1557 was a turning point for the
Ethio-Portuguese group.48 As previously stated, the mission had been
launched by the Portuguese crown with the chief purpose of not abandoning
the Portuguese flock and providing them with spiritual support. The Jesuit
missionaries contributed in a significant way to preserve – when not to
reinvent – the identity of the färänj according to Portuguese-Catholic
premises. With the mission, the focus was on religion. Unlike in other
missionary terrains, the Society’s strategy and the practice followed in
Ethiopia were not ones of accomodatio. The Jesuits’ strategy was one of
radical Latinisation of the Ethiopian Church, which affected their choices
on liturgy, iconology, architecture, moral issues and dogma. Consequently,
their impact on the Ethio-Portuguese was that of stressing their distinct
origin and protecting them from “contamination” from unwanted local
practices. Thus, while in its first decades of life this group might have
been short to full assimilation into the local groups, with the opening of
the mission the clusters that were closer to the priests came to emphasize
their foreign origin and somehow revive their Portuguese background. The
padroch, as the missionaries were known in Ethiopia, introduced the
Portuguese-born in Ethiopia to the Catholic rites and strove to minister to
as many Ethio-Portuguese as possible. It is worthwhile stopping for a
moment to look at three fields where missionary action was more strongly
felt in order to understand how a “Portuguese” identity was promoted
during the time of the Jesuit mission.
Firstly, the Jesuits had an impact on the marriage practices of the
Portuguese. Until the arrival of the Jesuits, the members of the Portuguese
militia mixed with local women and might have been little concerned with
the faith their partners professed and even less so with that of their
offspring. The missionaries, as spiritual leaders of the community, tried to

47
RASO X, 329.
48
The literature on this mission is vast. Among the most recent studies, I address
the reader to Hervé Pennec, Des jésuites au royaume du Prêtre Jean (Ethiopie):
Stratégies, rencontres et tentatives d’implantation (1495-1633), Paris: Fundação
Calouste Gulbenkian - Centre Cultural Calouste Gulbenkian, 2003 and Leonardo
Cohen, The Missionary strategies of the Jesuits in Ethiopia (1555 - 1632),
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009. A bibliography of relevant titles published prior
to 2005 is Leonardo Cohen & Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, `The Jesuit Mission
in Ethiopia: An Analytical Bibliography’, Aethiopica 9, 2006, 190-212.
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 17

fix this ‘problem’. They strove to control the marriage practices of the
Ethio-Portuguese and at least in part seem to have succeeded. Beyond their
status as priests, in their favour was the fact that they controlled the alms
sent from Portugal that were aimed for the clothing and for the payment of
the dowries (dote) of the Ethio-Portuguese. It is to be noted that this detail
was not plainly accepted by the Ethio-Portuguese and a few openly
complained about it.49 By managing the alms the missionaries could
thereby orient marriage preferences and sanction those families that had
behaved more according to their tenet.50 Therefore, whilst imposing
endogamic marriages within the Catholic groups might not have been
possible due to small numbers, the emphasis must have been on expanding
the Catholic group through the conversion of those seeking an alliance
with the Ethio-Portuguese.
To be true, the marriage policy was not fully successful and signs of
frustration from the missionaries punctuate their correspondence. In 1582,
the Jesuit Manuel Fernandez informed the Superior General in Rome that
several daughters of the Portuguese had to marry non-Catholics due to the
lack of Catholic partners.51 Earlier, a Portuguese soldier named Luiz
Custodio was reported to have married a “Nestorian wife”, i.e. a Christian
Orthodox, and he had himself converted to this faith, revealing a
behaviour that might have been more widespread.52 But the missionaries
achieved some victories, too. The Portuguese soldier Alvaro da Costa,
who became a close servant of Gälawdewos, was married to an Ethiopian

49
In 1628 a Jesuit priest reported that “for this reason the Portuguese became
suspicious [of the missionaries], since the fathers misused their alms, and so they
openly complain about that and discredit our image” (Pollo qual respeito entrarão
ja os Portuguezes em desconfiança, avendo que os padres lhe comem a dita
esmola, e assi fazem disso muitas queixas con notavel discredito nosso, como eu
ouvi nestes dous annos em que fui seu vigario), RASO XII, 312.
50
A few examples from the sources emphasize the interference the missionaries
had, or tried to have, in the marriage practices of the Ethio-Portuguese. Around
1605, a Portuguese widow married an Ethiopian Christian against the opposition of
the Jesuit fathers, who energetically (por suas amonestações e concelhos) tried to
persuade her not to do so, RASO XI, 117. On the missionaries managing the alms
sent from India for the Ethio-Portuguese and their marriage practices, see RASO
XII, 312.
51
`Many daughters of the Portuguese and other Catholic women, since there are
not enough Catholic partners, are forced to marry men who are alien to our holy
faith’ (Tem mais muitas molheres filhas de Portugueses difuntos e outras
catholicas, por nao aver homens catholicos com que se casem, casanse com outros
alienos de nossa santa fee), RASO X, 329.
52
RASO X, 144.
18 Chapter One

woman who had been converted by Bishop Oviedo.53 Also during this
period, in one of the most tense episodes between the negus and the
foreign community, Minas and the Orthodox abun forced the Bishop to
hand them the wives of Portuguese he had converted. The women were
imprisoned but must have been released at the death of the ruler.54
Secondly, the Jesuits were also active combating the practice of
circumcision, which as we saw above, was initially also forced upon
Ethio-Portuguese children. The foreign priests were adamant in banning
circumcision, initially only among those whom they ministered. Yet, once
they had gained more influence in the kingdom, they tried to impose this
rule over the wider Ethiopian society. Although historical literature attests
that they encountered serious opposition,55 it can be assumed that a large
number of the Ethio-Portuguese children under their ‘custody’ were kept
away from this rite.
There were deep religious reasons that pushed the missionaries to be so
rigid with this custom.56 What is more important for the present discussion,
however, are the practical consequences provoked by the missionaries’
rigid stand. For most of the societies on the Ethiopian highlands
circumcision was an essential rite of passage. The rite enforced upon the
individual the change that helped him evolve into a social being.
Uncircumcision was, in consequence, regarded as a serious imperfection
of the body; the uncircumcised person was seen as dirty, ugly,57 closer to
animal nature and unfit to live a normal social life. In modern Amharic
yaltägärräzä, literally ‘non-circumcised’, stands as well for “ill-mannered,
insolent, rude, and vulgar”.58 Therefore, the missionaries confronted their
neophytes with a difficult choice: either to give in to one of the most
pressing wishes of the missionaries while at the same time condemning
their children to the worst status in Ethiopian society, or to conform to

53
In sources, Custodio appears as “one of the closest servants of the Emperor” (um
dos grandes privados do Emperador); Couto, Da Asia, Década VII, liv. IV, cap.
XI; liv. VIII, cap. IX.
54
On this episode, see Couto, Da Asia, Década VII, liv. VIII, cap. IX.
55
RASO X, 329; RASO XI, 443; Archivum Romanum Societatis Jesu, Rome
(henceforth ARSI), Goa 39 II, 425v.
56
I have elaborated on that aspect in Andreu Martínez d’Alòs Moner, `Paul and the
Other: The Portuguese Debate on the Circumcision of the Ethiopians’, in: Verena
Böll et al. (eds.), Ethiopia and the Missions: Historical and Anthropological insights,
Münster: Lit, 2005, 31-51.
57
A Jesuit priest once reported that a local Ethiopian couple considered the
uncircumcised state of their son “ugly” (parecia fealfade); RASO XII, 474.
58
Thomas Leiper Kane, Amharic–English Dictionary, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
1990, 1938.
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 19

popular pressure and then be accused by the missionaries of judaizing

practices. For the Jesuits, renunciation of circumcision was seen as
imperative for salvation while the contrary was true for most Ethiopian
societies. The dilemma probably deterred many an Ethiopian to join the
mission on the terms expected by the European priests and it may have
also isolated those who complied fully with the Pauline-cum-Jesuit tenet
from society. Indeed, the Jesuits and those who followed their tenet found
themselves in the undesirable position that Ethiopians ascribed to the
uncircumcised. Their opponents often insulted them with the opprobrious
term qwälläfa59 and many probably saw their uncircumcision as a sign of the
foreigners’ barbaric nature.
Last but not least, the Portuguese language became the lingua franca in
the small communities that settled around the missionary centres. It was
the main language of instruction at the schools managed by the
missionaries and, together with Latin, might have been used during masses
as well. Moreover, during the period of strongest influence of the mission,
the Portuguese language gained in prestige: influential figures would send
their children to the missionary schools to enjoy of the education there but
also to make them acquainted with that language and some political
figures are reported having learnt it too. Se’elä Krestos, one of the
Ethiopian leaders closest to the missionaries, asked in 1612 his friend the
Jesuit Pedro Páez to teach him Portuguese and a few years later could
communicate in it.60 Moreover, in the 1610s the Jesuits had an interpreter
at the court, one Dionisos (or Denazios, born in 1607), who knew Amharic,
Portuguese and Latin.61
It has to be emphasized, however, that the missionaries also owed their
survival and success in large part to this mixed-race community. Indeed,
the role the Ethio-Portuguese played in helping the missionaries settle and
survive in the Ethiopian environment cannot be exaggerated. Oviedo and
his other four companions were received by two veterans of the 1540s
campaigns at landing on Arquico in 1557, Luiz Custodio and Antonio de

59
For example, in a letter from 1621 written by an unidentified supporter of
Ethiopian Christianity the negus was exhorted, “not to listen to the colafas, i.e. the
uncircumcised, who said that in Christ there are two natures” (não ouça os Colâfâs,
idest incircuncisos, que dizem que em Christo estão duas naturezas); RASO VI,
339.
60
Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, Mss/11088, 1-131r, here 119rv.
61
Dionisos was a gifted native scholar from Gorgora who served at least from
1613 to 1619; Arquivo Distrital de Braga, Portugal (henceforth ADB), Legajo 779,
doc.17, 117r; ARSI, Goa 39 I bis, 109v.
20 Chapter One

Sampaio.62 These would have then helped the priests cross safely the
dangerous Eritrean highlands. Moreover, as it was mentioned above, after
some years of wanderings, the missionaries settled towards 1565 in
Fremona, in the northern province of Tegray, in the company of a few
dozen Portuguese families.63 In the second and third missionary
settlements, Gorgora and Qwälläla, the same patterns can be observed. At
Gorgora, founded in 1605, the missionaries were surrounded by Ethio-
Portuguese who had settled in the 1570s.64 Meanwhile, an important
Burtukan settlement that remained without missionary presence was
Taqussa (“Tacussa, Tacuça”), northeast of Lake Tana, which the Jesuits
might have considered too distant from the Ethiopian court to establish
any presence.65 In all these settlements, the Portuguese militia was to all
intents and purposes fundamental in keeping at bay thieves, enemies and
rebels and providing an impression of strength and security. The
settlement of Fremona, for instance, suffered several attacks but was able
to defend itself on each occasion.66
The Ethio-Portuguese were also of paramount importance in revitalizing
the mission during its most critical moments. Between 1598 and 1602,
when all the Jesuits from the first period had died and no replacements
were forthcoming, a group of Portuguese elders formed a conselho and

62
RASO III, 40.
63
Fremona and some lands in the neighbourhood were reportedly given as a gwelt
(i.e. rights of cultivation and taxation over the land) to the Ethio-Portuguese;
RASO X, 207; RASO XI, 292, 230; Couto, Da Asia, Década VII, liv. VII, ch. XII;
RASO V, 463. Shortly after its foundation the village was reported having about
250 people, Bermudez, Breve relação da embaixada, ch. LVIII.
64
Reportedly, the group of Portuguese had settled at Dämbeya at the request of
negus Särsä Dengel and fleeing the insecurity that punctuated their life in the
north. In 1574, the Jesuit priests Francisco Lopes and Gonçalo Cardoso were sent
to preach among them but a permanent residence was only established at the
beginning of the next century, see RASO X, 265; RASO III, 115, 119.
65
The Jesuit priest Barradas reported that Taqussa `was the house of many
Portuguese’ (morada e assento de muitos Portuguezes); RASO IV, 10. His fellow
Manoel de Almeida reported that, towards 1626, in the regions of `Tacuça,
Gambelua, Cantafa’ there were said to be more than 2,000 Ethio-Portuguese;
RASO VI, 414.
66
On at least two occasions, in 1608 and 1616, Tegrayan rebels and opponents of
the mission tried unsuccessfully to storm the site. Towards 1612, an attack of the
Rayyaa Oromo tribe was also thwarted; RASO VI, 205-06, 335. It must be stressed
that Fremona became a stronghold in its own right for the site, located on a
strategic hill, was fortified and surrounded by a ring of walls with ramparts. On the
architectonic and military improvements at the site, see RASO VI, 378; RASO XI,
434; ARSI, Goa 39 I, 229r.
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 21

studied a plan to introduce new missionaries into the country.67 Although

by then the project to reinstate the mission was already underway in India,
the Ethio-Portuguese doubtlessly contributed to its success. One of the
elders who took part in the conselho, Mauriçio Soares, the son of one
Gaspar Soares, is also reported to have taken over ministry duties in his
Catholic parish during the years when there were no Jesuit missionaries.68

Figure 1. Northern view of the Portuguese settlement and the Jesuit Residence of
Fremona, ca. 1563-1633. The walls and bastions built between ca. 1600 and 1630
can be seen on the upper reaches. Photography by the author.

When the mission matured towards the beginning of the seventeenth

century, this relationship intensified. Towards the 1620s the Jesuits,
headed by the dynamic Pedro Páez (1564-1622), had already established a
network of residences where they lived and worked together with a great

67
See RASO III, 213-14.
68
Soares is mentioned as “father of the Christians” (paj dos christaes); ADB,
Legajo 779, vol. 1, doc. 15, 76v.
22 Chapter One

number of associates and aides who had – or claimed to have – Portuguese

ancestors. They also managed a group of schools where the Portuguese
children and a few locals received Jesuit teachings. Ethio-Portuguese,
having grown up at the Jesuit schools in Fremona, Gorgora and Qwälläla,
became then a well-trained and solid force the mission could fully rely on.
Every Jesuit father typically had one or two Portuguese youths or teens as
his aides. These aides served as interpreters, local guides and eventually
also joined in apostolic tasks. Moreover, towards the end of the mission at
least half a dozen of the Burtukan were ready to join the order, a privilege
that the Society of Jesus only conceded on rare occasions in their Asian
and African missions.69

Burtukan stories
It is worth recalling a number of those who grew up near the
missionaries or studied at the Jesuit schools due to their important
contribution to the mission. Among the most prominent figures was one
João Gabriel and his sons Basilio and Dionisio Gabriel. João Gabriel met
the three generations of Jesuits who worked in Ethiopia. He grew up with
Patriarch Andrés de Oviedo, and in his youth, together with António
Joannes and Manoel Jorge, served as one of the three Ethio-Portuguese
aides of Oviedo.70 Later in his life, he helped Pedro Páez and Manoel de
Almeida to safely enter Ethiopia, and became their guide and interpreter.
His son Basilio had similar commitments. He studied at one of the Jesuit
schools, probably Fremona, and was one of the first interpreters the Jesuits

69
As a matter of fact, admission to the order in the Orient was only open to recruits
from Japan and China, which has to be related with the high esteem in which these
two lands were held in the Society, especially in the mind of the Alessandro
Valignano, Visitor of the Jesuit missions in the East between 1573-1606. Thus,
although the way into the order was nowhere easy for Chinese and Japanese
nationals, in 1584 the easternmost mission had 29 Japanese dojuku (a term
borrowed from Japanese Buddhist institutions and literally meaning "cohabitant,"
auxiliary personnel who were not members of the Jesuit order but affiliated with it
in such capacities as acolyte, verger, and cathechist), and the first two Japanese
priests were ordained in ca. 1601. On discussions among Jesuits concerning the
ordination of the Japanese, see J.F. Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits.
Alessandro Valignano in sixteenth-century Japan, London-New York: Routledge,
1993, 2, 162-67.
70
ARSI, Goa 39 I, 250v; RASO XI, 367; Antonio de Arana, `Historia de la Santa
vida, muerte y virtudes de el Santo P. Andres de Oviedo (..)’, 1631 (manuscript),
Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, Codice 4473, 93.
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 23

had at the royal court. He was made governor of a region and as captain he
died whilst on an expedition he commanded against the Agäw.71
During the most favourable mission period, at their schools and
residences the missionaries found zealous aides who accompanied them in
country missions and served as private interpreters and guides. One
Francisco Machado was an aide to the Jesuit João Pereira, whilst two other
Ethio-Portuguese, Cosme de Mesquita and Lucas Rapozo, were the guides
of the same Pereira and of his fellow Gaspar Paes, respectively.72 Another
Ethio-Portuguese, Zana Gabriel Machado, was assistant to the Italian
father Bruno Bruni for ten years and was killed by traditionalists in ca.
1635.73 Jacobo Alexandre (born ca. 1586 in Ethiopia), the son of one
Spaniard “messer Alexandre” and a student in Fremona, in the early 1610s
helped the Jesuit Lorenzo Romano to oversee the residence in Tegray. In
the late 1610s, Alexandre also participated with father de Angelis in a
proselytizing campaign among the Agäw that saw the baptism of
“eighteen thousand men”. In ca. 1625 he was ordained as a priest by the
Jesuit Patriarch Afonso Mendes and became chaplain and confessor to the
missionaries.74 Paulo Nogueira, a grandson of one of Christovão’s soldiers
(perhaps one Jorge Nogueira) and xum (i.e. landlord), helped eight
missionaries, among whom Patriarch Mendes, to cross the dangerous route
that brought them through the Danakil from Berbera to the Tegray.75
Finally, the figures of Bernardo Nogueira and António de Andrade,
both born in Ethiopia of Portuguese grandparents, are worth mentioning
for the role they played during the period when the Catholics were
persecuted. Nogueira grew up in one of the Jesuit residences, was ordained
a priest and in 1646 was accepted into the Society off the record. During a
few years he served as the liaison between the exiled Jesuit leadership in
India and the remaining Catholic clusters in Ethiopia.76 Moreover, he was
one of the leaders of the Catholic group until he was captured and hanged
in 1652 by an anti-Catholic mob.77 António de Andrade, whom some
sources indicate as a grandson of the captain João Gabriel, grew up in
Fremona. In the mid-1630s, he accompanied some missionaries fleeing to

71
RASO III, 223-24; RASO XI, 54, 424, 432; ARSI, Goa 39 I bis, 109r. The other
brother, Dionisio, appears also in the historical record as a landowner and Catholic;
RASO XIII, 266.
72
RASO VII, 362, 370; RASO XIII, 37-38, 55.
73
RASO VII, 361-77.
74
RASO VII, 17-23; RASO XII, 340, 368.
75
RASO VI, 458; RASO XII, 147.
76
RASO XIII, 265.
77
RASO XIII, 412-13.
24 Chapter One

India and in Goa studied grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and theology. It

was in Goa that at some point in the 1630s he was accepted into the Jesuit
order, after which he would lead a failed mission organized in India to
regain a foothold in Ethiopia.78
These careers also indicate that towards the end of the 1620s the
Jesuits had done the groundwork for the mission’s internal renewal.
Similar to the case of the Japan mission, where local scholars and dojuku
constituted a valuable workforce in its missionary structure,79 in Ethiopia a
large number of scholars and “irmãos da orden”, principally of Portuguese
blood, were active participants in the missionary project. Moreover, it is
reasonable to argue that they would have been the principal assets the
mission was to count on in the future had this project not been abruptly
halted during the political and religious upheavals of the 1630s.

Crisis, assimilation and exile

On 16 September 1632, negus Susenyos died. The death of the ruler
who during two decades had backed wholeheartedly missionary activities
in the land was the prelude to the rapid collapse of the Jesuit project in
Ethiopia. Susenyos’s son, Fasilädäs (1632-1667), shortly after gaining
power, abolished most of the measures that had been promoted by the
foreign priests. He also published a decree on freedom of religion that
made the Jesuit presence in the land a risky endeavour. This was the
prelude to a decade of persecutions against the missionaries and the
Catholics at large.
This political U-turn had, as it could be imagined, serious consequences
for the Ethio-Portuguese. Those who had embraced the foreign faith and
who lived closer to the missionaries were to follow the same fate of the
padres. It is likely that Ethio-Portuguese Catholics who decided to hold on
to their faith lost their rights and possessions and the frequent anti-
Catholic riots that ensued within the ten years of Fasilädäs’s restoration
may have resulted in the pillaging and sacking of any valuables they might
have possessed. In 1634, Fasilädäs ordered all the missionaries to leave the
country and the Ethio-Portuguese to be relocated at his royal camp
somewhere in Dämbeya. Following this decision, a large group of Jesuit
priests accompanied by a few hundred Catholics, mostly Ethio-Portuguese,
went into exile to India.80

78
RASO VII, 458; RASO XIII, 251-52; RASO I, 179.
79
Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits, 52-53, 167-68.
80
RASO VII, 255-59.
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 25

During a few years, the Catholic clusters in Ethiopia hid from Ethiopian
authorities and continued professing their faith. They were led by eight
Jesuit priests who had remained in the country and four priests of
Portuguese origin who had been ordained by the Patriarch before his
departure for India.81 Moreover, initially, the Catholic groups counted with
the protection of some Ethiopian lords such as baher nägash Yohannes
Akay, the xum of Bur Käflä Maryam and kantiba Zära Yohannes who
either sympathized with the Catholics or owed them some past favours.82
Soon, however, Ethiopian authorities increased vigilance and stepped up
the persecution of the Catholic fellows. By 1640, all the Jesuits had been
assassinated together with at least six local priests and assistants. In 1646,
Bernardo Nogueira, who by then served as liaison with the Jesuits in India
and was one of the leaders of the Catholics in Ethiopia, reported that five
Portuguese priests and confessors were still active in Ethiopia, together
with three Amhara aides.83 Six years later, shortly after having received at
Massawa news of his acceptance into the Society of Jesus, Nogueira was
himself hanged.84
Not all the Ethio-Portuguese, however, were the object of persecutions.
Some of them chose to compromise and accepted Ethiopian Orthodoxy.
How large this group was is unknown and missionary sources are often
elusive when speaking of these ‘traitors’. In 1646, Nogueira informed the
Jesuits in India that Damo and Rafael Fernández, two captains of the
Portuguese militia, had embraced Orthodoxy with their families.85 From
their example, it can be inferred that a considerable number of the
Burtukan soldiers and their families embraced Ethiopian Orthodoxy. Such
an act might have granted them peace and, more importantly, the
preservation of their military status and careers. Indeed, negus Fasilädäs,
like his father, is known to have had a company of Ethio-Portuguese
soldiers under his command throughout his reign.

81
The eight Jesuit priests were: Bishop Apollinar de Almeida, Bruno Bruni, Luís
Cardeira, Luíz de Azevedo, Jacinto Francisco, Gaspar Paes, Francisco Rodrigues
and João Pereira. The Ethio-Portuguese priests were Bernardo Nogueira, Lourenço
da Costa, Pero da Costa and António Dalmança; see Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, `In
the Company of Iyäsus’, 287 & Appendix 7.
82
The kantiba was a representative of the Ethiopian monarch in a small region, or
village.
83
RASO XIII, 265.
84
RASO XIII, 412-13.
85
RASO XIII, 265. Fernández was mentioned as captain of the Portuguese troops
already in 1633, at the same time when the Patriarch Mendes left his library in
Fernández’s custody; RASO XIII, 62.
26 Chapter One

The Ethio-Portuguese who had abandoned Catholic practices continued

to live unmolested in Ethiopia until the death of Fasilädäs. They preserved a
distinctive identity and were considered as a group apart, notwithstanding the
fact that the cultural and racial differences with the larger population
might have been very minute.
The accession of Fasilädäs’s son, Yohannes (1667-1682), who had
never seen any missionary nor had been raised surrounded by foreigners
like his father and grandfather, sealed their fate. During the first year of his
reign, probably under the pressure of conservative ecclesiastics, Yohannes
convened a political-religious council. In the council it was decided that the
Burtukan leave the country.86 For a reason that is still not clear, the foreign
group chose to resettle in the city of Funj, capital of the kingdom of
Sennar, then ruled by Badi II (1644/5-1681) instead of going ‘back’ to
India. It seems reasonable to assume that such a move was not improvised
and that it had been planned beforehand and a more in depth research into
the relations between Christian Ethiopia and Sennar may shed light on this
episode. Furthermore, it can be speculated that by relocating to this
Muslim principality, then the centre of a wide-ranging commercial
network, they sought new opportunities to carry on their mercenary life-
style. 87
Henceforth, the traces of the Ethio-Portuguese diaspora in the Sudan
get lost. In 1696, an Ethiopian envoy of the negus still attested of their
presence in Sennar.88 Later on, however, the numerous Catholic missionaries
and explorers who crossed this kingdom on their way to the Ethiopian

86
The episode is reported in Ignazio Guidi (trans.), Annales Johannis I, Iyāsu I,
Bakāffā, Louvain: Secrétariat du CSCO, 1961 (repr. from 1903), Corpus
scriptorum christianorum orientalium Vol. 25, Scriptores Aethiopici T. 8, 6-11.
87
On the Kingdom of Sennar, the classic study is by Jay Spaulding, The heroic age
in Sinnar, East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1985.
88
The Ethiopian envoy, the Armenian Murad, responding to a questionnaire sent
him by the Dutch authorities in Batavia that had been prepared by the Orientalist
Hiob Ludolph, reported that: ‘The envoy says that this is not 150, but about 70
[sic.] years ago when the emperor banished all of them out of his empire, so that at
present not a single Portuguese is to be found in Abyssinia. All have left for the
regions of Soenar, where several of them are still living under the Muslims; some
still practice the Roman religion, others have adopted Islam’, quoted in Emeri Van
Donzel, Foreign relations of Ethiopia, 1642-1700. Documents relating to the
Journeys of Khodja Murad, Leiden: Nederlands Historisch-archaeologisch Institut,
1979, 94.
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 27

highlands failed to mention their presence.89 With the Burtukan that might
have managed to stay in Ethiopia the story was likewise. Hence, when in
the end of the eighteenth century the Scotsman James Bruce went to
Gondar and travelled extensively across Ethiopia he found no “Portuguese”
groups.90
The memory of the Burtukan was not easily erased, though. In the
decades that ensued after their migration to Sennar, some local groups and
political figures would claim to descend from them. Queen Mentewab
(a.k.a. Berhan Mogasa, 1706-1773), a dominant figure during the late
Gondarine period, and two dynasties from the southern region of Ennarya,
the Sigaro and Sapera, alleged to have Portuguese ancestors.91 The myth
of the Ethio-Portuguese also survived in other forms. A large number of
the buildings and infrastructure works built during the Gondarine kingdom
(1640s to 1760s), mostly built by local workers and Indian and Arab
masons, would be identified by European travellers as genuinely
Portuguese.92 Even today, the magnificent “Portuguese bridge” over the

89
A compendium of missionary accounts on Sennar appears in Osbert G.S.
Crawfurd, The Fung Kingdom of Sennar. With a Geographical Account of the
Middle Nile Region, Gloucester: John Bellows Ltd., 1951.
90
Bruce’s narrative was the first lengthy eye-witness account after the demise of
the Jesuit mission, James Bruce, Travels to discover the source of the Nile, in the
years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773, Farnborough: Gregg Internat.
Publ., 4 vols., 1972 (1790).
91
According to James Bruce, the first to have spoken of Mentewab’s Portuguese
blood, she was the granddaughter of one `Victor’, brother of Minas (a reference to
Fiqtor, son of Minas?), who was the father of one azmach Robel, Mentewab’s
father from a Portuguese woman, Bruce, Travels to discover the sources of the
Nile, vol. 2, 611. Now, missionary sources refer to an azmach (a military
commander, literally `the one who leads’) called Robel, who helped the Portuguese
militia in 1541, but he lived too long before Mentewab to be her ‘grandfather’.
However, Portuguese and Jesuit sources also mention one azmach `Reguet
Baranda’ who married a Burtukan named Anna and fathered a woman called
Aragabo who lived in the 1620s; though still distant in time, this Aragabo lies
closer to the period of Queen Mentewab and could thus be one of her alleged
Portuguese ancestors; ADB, Legajo 779, doc. 40, 472. On the Sigaro and Sapera,
see Antonio Cecchi, Da Zeila alle frontiere del Caffa, Roma: Ermanno Loescher,
1886, 157.
92
The references found in European travel literature to `Portuguese buildings’ in
Gondärine Ethiopia are numerous and two may serve to illustrate this point. In the
eigheenth century, the Franciscan Remedius Prutky, who had been in Gondär in
1751, described Fasilädäs’s palace as `built in the past by the Portuguese and was
well fortified’, Remedius Prutky, Prutky's travels in Ethiopia and other countries,
tr. and ed. by J.H. Arrowsmith-Brown and annotated by Richard Pankhurst,
28 Chapter One

Abbay, near the Tis Issat Falls, constitutes one of the chief attractions of
the country.

Conclusions
The history of the Burtukan in Ethiopia represents one of the many
histories of mixed-race communities born during the early expansion in
the East. Most of the Portuguese who migrated to the East were youngsters
and members of the under-class seeking opportunities that their
motherland did not offer. Like the members of the lower echelons of the
fidalguía, for many of these fellows the migration to the East was the gate
to prosperous careers or, more prosaically, as in the case of the new
Christians or those fleeing justice, simply a refuge. Christian Ethiopia, or
the Preste, as it was often called at the time, became in the sixteenth
century one such land of shelter and opportunities. To be sure, half of
those who resettled there paid with their lives for their adventurousness,
and not a few might have encountered abroad the destitution they thought
they had abandoned at home. But a few successful careers are also attested
and the century-long activities of the Portuguese militia in the Ethiopian
state demonstrate that migration also offered some rewards.
In this study, I have benefited from the richness of sources and used
prosopographical analysis to reconstruct the dynamics of the Portuguese
minority in Ethiopia. Thereby, it has been possible to follow the entire
process of genesis, development and disappearance of the Ethio-Portuguese
group. Moreover, the paper has focused on some of the main features of
the identity of this group as well as the way they integrated into wider
Ethiopian society. It has been shown that the Ethio-Portuguese played an
important role in the unfolding of the Jesuit mission. Whilst recently this
mission has been the focus of increasing attention, the contribution of
Ethio-Portuguese to this episode had been hitherto largely neglected. To
be sure, for a few decades Jesuits and Burtukan lived in the same places
and shared similar goals. The Ethio-Portuguese found in the Jesuit
missionaries spiritual guidance and a way to reinforce their ‘Portuguese’
identity. The missionaries, in their turn, enjoyed in the Ethio-Portuguese
fellows and in the youth they trained at their schools a valuable pool of
aides, associates and followers. Thus, whilst it is hardly conceivable that

London: Hakluyt Society, 1991, 173. Similarly, in the next century the Frenchman
Raffray, who stayed in Ethiopia from 1873 to 1875, described Gondär as
`longtemps la résidence des Atiés et des Raz d’Amarah, qui se plaisaient dans les
palais que leur avaient construits les Portugais’, Achille Raffray, Abyssinie:
Afrique orientale, Paris: Plon, 1880 (2. ed.), 296.
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 29

the Ethio-Portuguese would have preserved their distinct identity without

the arrival of the missionaries, the opposite seems to have occurred too:
the mission might not have been able to survive for so many decades and
with so few members as it had without the help of the Portuguese group.
Moreover, it has been also shown that during the 1610s and 1620s, the
most fruitful period for the mission, logistic and apostolic tasks were
shared by a number of well-trained and energetic youths, mostly from
among the rank of the Ethio-Portuguese.
Last but not least, an important political dimension of the Ethio-
Portuguese story, which could only be sketched here, was their integration
in the Ethiopian state structure. Like their Portuguese ancestors, the Ethio-
Portuguese became a militia serving the Ethiopian negus. They introduced
modern military skills to a backward army and might thus have provided it
with a resilience that it did not possess before. Taking this into account, an
hypothesis might be made that the Ethio-Portuguese militia contributed to
the relative peace that the Ethiopian state endured under their presence. As
a matter of fact, from the late sixteenth century to the downfall of the
Gondärine kingdom in the late eighteenth century, the Ethiopian state was
able to preserve the same territory and centre of power, thus enjoying one
of the longest periods of stability in the history of the Solomonid dynasty.
A more in depth investigation, such as comparing the Portuguese with
other foreign groups that during the same period were active in the
Christian Ethiopian state, might shed new light on the contribution of
foreigners to stabilizing political power in pre-Gondärine and Gondärine
Ethiopia. In addition, a more wide-encompassing and comparative
analysis of the different Portuguese comunidades in the East, one which
would need to draw on the joint work of different scholars, could elucidate
the geopolitical impact Portuguese (and European) diasporas had upon
local polities in the Orient.
30 Chapter One

Figure 2: Map of Jesuit Residences and Sites with Ethio-Portuguese in Ethiopia,

ca. 1545-1670.

Main Ethio-Portuguese settlements

Jesuit residences
Other sites
 Early Portuguese Emigration to the Ethiopian Highlands 31

Figure 3. Portuguese Family Trees in Ethiopia 1541-ca. 1650.

32 Chapter One