New history changes balance of power between Ethiopia and Medieval Europe

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In early 2020, just as the scope and scale of the coronavirus pandemic was revealing itself, historian Verena Krebs went to spend a few months at her parents’ house in the German countryside. There, “next to fields of rapeseed and barley and dense old woods,” in her words, the Ruhr-University Bochum professor would wait out Germany’s lockdown. She wasn’t terribly worried about not having things to do though, since she had her book on the history of late medieval Ethiopia to finish up.

The good news was that she had already completed the full manuscript and had secured a contract with a major academic publisher. The bad news was more existential: She didn’t like the book she had written. Krebs knew her sources ran against the dominant narrative that placed Europe as aiding a needy Ethiopia, the African kingdom desperately in search of military technology from its more sophisticated counterparts to the north. Krebs worried that her interpretation of the original medieval sources was, in her own words, too “out there’” 

Instead of tweaking what was already written, she decided to do what good historians do and follow the sources. “I basically deleted the manuscript that I had submitted. And I just wrote the whole thing anew. I started writing in April, and I finished the whole thing by, I think, August.” 

What emerged, published earlier this year as Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, is a story that flips the script. Traditionally, the story centered Europe and placed Ethiopia as periphery, a technologically backwards Christian kingdom that, in the later Middle Ages, looked to Europe for help. But by following the sources, Krebs showcases the agency and power of Ethiopia and Ethiopians at the time and renders Europe as it was seen from East Africa, as a kind of homogenous (if interesting) mass of foreigners.

The book is already having an impact on life outside the academy. Solomon Gebreyes Beyene, a research fellow from Ethiopia now at the University of Hamburg, told us, “Most ordinary Ethiopians who have completed high school and even university have learned that Ethiopia pursued a closed-door policy in the Middle Ages,” or at most desperately sought military help and weapons from the north. Perhaps because of that, medieval Ethiopia isn’t a period that’s discussed much at all.

Source - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/new-history-changes-balance-power-between-ethiopia-and-medieval-europe-180978084/

[Angelina Stefania 427]

Explain.

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18 hours ago, Angelina Stefania said:

Explain.

Instead of thinking of medieval Ethiopia as an undeveloped, poor, weak state constantly looking for help from European countries such as Aragon or France, new research is looking into the possibility of Ethiopia being a functional state, more on par with the European powers at the time. So a less Europocentric view. The resources this author used are not new, but the way she looked into them and read them is new.

This relates with the issue of established narrativies affecting  the original meaning of ancient and medieval sources. For many years, these sources talking about medieval Ethiopia were read like Ethiopia was a needy and unstable state by default, but in a different light they can paint a different picture of a more stable state. History is full of things like this, and there is a lot of subjectivity. 

Hope I said it well.