The Two Yoḥannәses of Santo Stefano degli Abissini, Rome Reconstructing Biography and Cross-Cultural Encounter Through Manuscript Evidence

ABSTRACT

The Ethiopian Orthodox monastery of Santo Stefano degli Abissini in Rome was one of four diasporic Ethiopian communities around the Mediterranean and played a central role in disseminating knowledge about Ethiopian language, culture, and religion in sixteenth-century Europe. Yet apart from its most famous member, Täsfa Ṣǝyon, very little is known about the identities and careers of its monks. This article draws on the surviving Geez manuscripts of Santo Stefano’s own library, as well as European correspondence and archival documents, to reconstruct the biographies of two influential denizens of Santo Stefano. Hitherto believed to be a single person, Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare and Giovanni Battista “the Indian” (whom we identify instead as Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus) in fact followed quite different career trajectories, and illustrate the variety of ways in which Ethiopian Orthodox identity could be negotiated in a Catholic European setting.

The pilgrim hostel-cum-monastery of Santo Stefano degli Abissini (or dei Mori) in Rome is well known to scholars of medieval and early-modern Ethiopia. Part of the Ethiopian diaspora around the Mediterranean whose other centers, of much older foundation, were located in Jerusalem, Cairo, and Cyprus, the monks of Santo Stefano played a particularly important role as cultural intermediaries between Europe and Ethiopia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite the community’s murky origins—Ethiopians are first attested at Santo Stefano in 1497, but as “violators” whose rights to it were clearly not secure—it was sufficiently established by the second decade of the sixteenth century to have helped produce the first printed book in Gǝʿǝz, the Psalterium Aethiopicum (Rome, 1513).¹ The monks’ numbers fluctuated over the following decades, and had dwindled to a single monk by 1628, when the pope ordered the community’s closing and appropriated its books for the Vatican Libary. Ethiopian pilgrims were again admitted to Santo Stefano a few years later, and though their numbers were not large in the later seventeenth century, the critical role played by one of its denizens, Gorgoryos, in the scholarship of Hiob Ludolf attests to Santo Stefano’s continuing role as a center of Ethiopian-European intellectual exchange.²

The peak of Santo Stefano’s intellectual influence was nonetheless the mid-sixteenth century, for it was in this period that Täsfa Ṣǝyon, who had arrived in Rome by 1536 and died there in 1552, tirelessly disseminated knowledge of Ethiopian language and culture.³ Friend of Pope Paul III and correspondent of several reform-minded prelates, he tutored a series of European scholars, including Pietro Paolo Gualtieri, Bernardino Sandri, Paolo Giovio, and Guillaume Postel. He edited the Gǝʿǝz New Testament (Testamentum Novum, Rome, 1548–49) and published, also in 1549, Latin translations of the Ethiopian rituals of baptism and the Mass. He also collaborated with Mariano Vittori, another scholar to whom he taught Gǝʿǝz, on the first printed grammar of that language, published in 1552 His frequent mention in the writings of his European colleagues and memorialization in European works of art attest to his role as the prime representative of Ethiopian learning and culture in sixteenth-century Europe.⁴

Much less is known, however, about the other monks of Santo Stefano in the sixteenth century. The manuscripts copied or annotated at Santo Stefano offer considerable information on members of the community, but have not yet been thoroughly inventoried or subject to sustained prosopo-graphical analysis. European sources, for their part, occasionally offer information on monks other than Täsfa Ṣǝyon, but refer to Ethiopians by European aliases (much as Täsfa Ṣǝyon was known to Europeans as “Peter the Indian”), which poses a challenge to their full identification.

The case of Giovanni Battista “the Indian” illustrates these evidentiary difficulties. He is the only Ethiopian colleague of Täsfa Ṣǝyon to have received much scholarly attention, thanks to his mention in a number of European sources. None of these sources, however, give his Ethiopian name. In the 1930s, the Ethiopianists Sylvain Grébaut and Eugène Tisserant identified him as Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare, a monk frequently mentioned in the Gǝʿǝz manuscripts belonging to Santo Stefano.⁵ This identification has been accepted in subsequent scholarship as one of the few firm prosopographical facts available on the community’s members.⁶

As we shall argue here, however, the individual known to Europeans as Giovanni Battista was not Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare—a contemporary and equally prominent denizen of Santo Stefano—but rather the monk known to his fellow Ethiopians in Rome as Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus. Our argument rests on paleographical analysis as well as an array of documentary evidence, and illustrates the richer historical data that can result from the synthesis of different disciplinary tools. For in the process of disentangling the two monks’ identities, we shall have occasion to identify their different origins, reconstruct much of their careers, and observe the different skills, inclinations, and even personal qualities they brought to their experience in Europe. Ultimately, the portraits of the two Yoḥannǝses that emerge from this study open a larger window onto cross-cultural encounter in the sixteenth century, exemplifying the variety of ways in which Ethiopian Orthodox identity could be negotiated in a Catholic European setting.

Giovanni Battista

The most detailed source of information on Giovanni Battista “the Indian” is the dossier of testimony collected in autumn 1564 to review Giovanni Battista’s candidacy for the post of Ethiopian bishop of Nicosia (Cyprus). In addition to brief comments from European and Ethiopian witnesses regarding the candidate’s “life and morals,” the dossier includes an interview with Giovanni Battista himself in which he offered an account of his life.⁷ As he reported, he was born on Cyprus to an Ethiopian father and an Egyptian mother of Ethiopian descent, his parents having migrated from Egypt to Cyprus before his birth.⁸ His birthdate is not known precisely. A European witness who knew Giovanni Battista only in Italy, Giovanni da Torano, estimated his age at “around 50”; Giovanni Battista himself said that he was “50 and more” or, on another occasion, “around 50 or 55”⁹ These notices place his birth between 1509 and 15⒕ Giovanni Battista then stated that around age fifteen he left Cyprus and came to Europe (doubtless via Venice, which then controlled Cyprus and was the usual port of entry from the eastern Mediterranean), “and I was in Rome, in Portugal and at Santiago [de Compostella] in Galicia, and then returned toward the eastern Indies, where I met the ambassador [Ṣägga Zä-ʾAb] of our king, and I came with him to Lisbon. And with Francesco Alvares and don Martino, ambassador of the king of Portugal, I came to Italy and was in Bologna, while the ambassador of our king stayed in Lisbon, because the king of Portugal would not let him come to Italy on account of the wars. And I translated the letters of our king, brought by Francesco Alvares and by don Martino to His Holiness in Bologna.”¹⁰ The embassy to which Giovanni Battista here referred was that sent by King Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl (1508–1540) to the king of Portugal and to the pope, which reached Pope Clement VII in Bologna in January 1533.

Even given the uncertainty surrounding Giovanni Battista’s birth date, it seems unlikely that this account of his travels is wholly reliable. The embassy in question left Ethiopia in April 1526, sailed on to India, and began its return voyage in January 1527, reaching Portugal in late July. The ambassadors then remained in Portugal for more than five years before reaching the pope in Bologna.¹¹ To have joined this embassy in “the eastern Indies” (by which he might have meant either Ethiopia or India), Giovanni Battista would have to have reached Ethiopia by April 1526, or else have serendipitously encountered the ambassadors in India no later than the first days of 1527 If he was indeed aged fifty in 1564, this is impossible: he would have been only twelve or thirteen years old in 1526–27 and still living on Cyprus. If he was instead five years older, he would have first come to Europe circa 1524, but even this chronology leaves well under three years to account not only for his travels to Rome, Portugal, and Galicia, but also for the usually long and arduous journey to Ethiopia or India. More likely is that Giovanni Battista did indeed travel in Italy, Galicia, and Portugal, and simply encountered the embassy in Portugal sometime between 1527 and 1532. His proclaimed role in the embassy’s meeting with the pope is also open to question.¹²

Giovanni Battista’s next notice of himself is that he returned to Cyprus “around 1535.” He stayed on the island for three years, receiving his priestly ordination by the Coptic bishop of Cyprus and performing the Mass there in Gǝʿǝz in 1538. Returning then to Italy, he stayed in Venice, where “I had authorization from the legate Veralle to celebrate the Mass in Latin, and I gave my first Mass in Capodistria with the permission of the bishop of that territory, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and I stayed there two years.” Summoned to Rome, as he claimed, by Cardinal Contarini at the request of Pope Paul III, he answered the summons when his two years in Venice were finished, thus presumably in 1540.¹³ Giovanni Battista’s startling desire to celebrate the Mass in Latin, and thus presumably following the Catholic rite, may represent a first glimmer of his interest in conversion, which he would undertake some years later.

Of his activities in the 1540s, Giovanni Battista related only that he was received into the house of “the Theatine cardinal” (Gian Pietro Carafa, the future Pope Paul IV), “where I stayed until his death.”¹⁴ Other sources offer more specific notice of him in Rome in 1547. In July of that year, Täsfa Ṣǝyon and Pietro Paolo Gualtieri were working on a translation of the Ethiopian ritual of the Mass, which they sent to Cardinal Marcello Cervini by way of his secretary, Guglielmo Sirleto. On 5 September, Sirleto wrote to Cervini that the same text had also been translated by “don Giambattista, who is chaplain of the Theatine cardinal, and I believe that it has been translated faithfully, and almost word for word. … [Carafa], much praising your proposal to have the canon translated by fra Pietro [i.e., Täsfa Ṣǝyon], has ordered Gioanbattista that he too translate it as a service to God and also as a service to you.”¹⁵ On 18 September, Cervini answered, “To your letter of the 5th I can only reply that having received, together with your letter, the other translation of the Ethiopian Mass done by don Giovanni Battista, I looked at it willingly, and can only praise the labor that he devoted to it, as I wrote to him also, thanking him; you can do the same in person when it is convenient.”¹⁶ This Giovanni Battista is certainly our man: a witness for his episcopal nomination in 1564 testified to meeting him in the house of Gian Pietro Carafa some eighteen years earlier (thus circa 1546), and observed that the Ethiopian was Carafa’s chaplain, precisely as Sirleto reported.¹⁷ Giovanni Battista’s translation of the Mass ritual was clearly independent of the translation that Gualtieri and Täsfa Ṣǝyon were simultaneously doing, but it may have been consulted for the translation of the Mass ritual published by Täsfa Ṣǝyon in 1549.

Giovanni Battista resumes his autobiography by noting that “in the time of Pope Julius III [1550–1555], recognizing that I had been ordained by the aforementioned heretical Coptic bishop [of Cyprus], who did not use the rite that the Roman Church uses … I spoke with the Theatine cardinal who was then in Naples. He conferred with Pope Julius, who sent the case to the Inquisition, and thus I was re-ordained in all the orders, first receiving confirmation from the bishop of Veglia of good memory.”¹⁸

Giovanni Battista’s conversion from Ethiopian Orthodoxy to Catholicism was thus accomplished no later than March 1555, on the advice of the cardinal to whom he had been chaplain for several years. After that cardinal’s election as Pope Paul IV in May 1555, Giovanni Battista regularly appears in papal records as a chaplain of His Holiness and recipient of clothing from the pope’s tailor.¹⁹ In February 1560, as a familiar of the new pope, Pius IV, he proposed Cardinal Giovanni Morone as protector of the Ethiopian community of Santo Stefano, of which Giovanni Battista himself, according to the papal brief announcing Morone’s appointment, was “prior and chaplain.”²⁰ In early 1561, Pius IV tasked him with translating letters sent to the pope from the patriarch of Alexandria, praising Giovanni Battista’s fluency in Arabic as well as Latin; in September of that year, Giovanni Battista accompanied the pope to Perugia, where he participated, with squire and horse, in the Company of the Holy Sacrament.²¹ In late 1564, as noted above, he was nominated to be (Catholic) bishop of the Ethiopian community of Cyprus. The nomination was confirmed in February 1565, and Giovanni Battista probably left soon afterward for his homeland, where he fell gravely ill and soon died.²²

Giovanni Battista’s identification as Yoḥannәs of Qänṭorare

But was Giovanni Battista Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare? The identification was first made by Sylvain Grébaut and Eugène Tisserant in their detailed catalog of the Vaticani etiopici collection of Gǝʿǝz manuscripts in the Vatican Libary, published in 1935–36.²³ The Vaticani etiopici collection is indeed a promising place to look. Sixty-six of its manuscripts, by Grébaut and Tisserant’s count, passed directly from Santo Stefano to the Vatican in 1628, and at least two others produced at Santo Stefano reached the Vatican even earlier.²⁴ Many contain ownership notes, scribal colophons, and witness lists in which the Ethiopian names of the monks present in the community were recorded.

Exactly what data in these manuscripts prompted Grébaut and Tisserant’s identification of Giovanni Battista as Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare, however, remains unclear. Grébaut, an accomplished paleographer, succeeded in identifying the hand of Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare, who copied a number of manuscripts at Santo Stefano. This monk identified himself explicitly as the scribe of MS Vaticano etiopico (Vat. et.) 35, which therefore offers an indisputable example of his handwriting (figure 3). Doubtless using this hand as a benchmark, Grébaut and Tisserant eventually identified three other manuscripts, all of which lack a scribal colophon, as having been copied by the same man: MSS Vaticano Rossiano 865, Vat. et. 1, and Vat. et. 2 (figures 4 and 5).²⁵ None of these manuscripts, however, mention Giovanni Battista or link that name to Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare. That link is made by the cataloguers on two occasions. First, in their description of MS Vat. et. 66, they note that the manuscript makes reference to Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare, “the one, as it seems, who was bishop in Cyprus”—in other words, Giovanni Battista. The manuscript itself, however, does not make this connection, nor do the cataloguers explain their reasoning. The second occasion on which the cataloguers link the two names is in their introduction, which opens the second volume of the catalog. Here they state that MS Vat. et. 2 was copied by Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare, and add in the attached footnote, “Giovanni Battista the Indian, on whom see [Sebastian] Merkle, loc. cit [p. 354], is Yoḥannǝs son of Qänṭorare, who copied Vat. et. 2.”²⁶

This last comment suggests that Sebastian Merkle’s article played a role in the cataloguers’ identification of Giovanni Battista and Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare. On the page cited by Grébaut and Tisserant, Merkle stated that Giovanni Battista had translated the Gǝʿǝz canons of the Council of Nicaea into Latin.²⁷ Grébaut and Tisserant knew that a partial Latin translation of these canons was to be found in MS Vat. et. 2.²⁸ They may therefore have concluded that Giovanni Battista was not only the translator responsible for the partial Latin translation found in this manuscript, but the scribe of the manuscript as well—a scribe whom, upon paleographical evidence, they had already identified as Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare. If this was the cataloguers’ inference, it rests on circumstantial evidence: nothing requires that the monk who translated part of a text into Latin also copied the accompanying Gǝʿǝz text. But in fact, even this circumstantial connection is baseless, for Merkle’s statement is incorrect. In his overview of the Sirleto-Cervini correspondence described above, Merkle claimed that in a letter of 31 August 1547, Sirleto had wondered why the Gǝʿǝz version of the canons of the Council of Nicaea was so much longer than the Latin version, and had at the same time announced Giovanni Battista’s translation of the Gǝʿǝz version into Latin. Sirleto’s letter does indeed express curiosity about the “extra” canons found in the Gǝʿǝz copy, but makes no mention whatever of Giovanni Battista.²⁹

Without consulting the original manuscript correspondence between Sirleto and Cervini, Grébaut and Tisserant could not have been aware of Merkle’s error, and circumstantial similarities could well have recommended the identification of Giovanni Battista and Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare: the relative prominence attached to the two names, the propinquity of their dates, perhaps even the fact, if Grébaut and Tisserant knew it, that Giovanni Battista (like Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare, as we shall see) was at one time identified as prior of Santo Stefano.³⁰ It is nonetheless safe to say that no persuasive evidence linking the European name Giovanni Battista to the Ethiopian name Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare can be reconstructed from the clues that Grébaut and Tisserant have left in their erudite catalog, nor have our investigations uncovered any new evidence in that direction.

Giovanni Battista as Yoḥnnәs of Cyprus

Giovanni Battista’s Ethiopian name may therefore be considered an open question, and two other codices from Santo Stefano offer a persuasive candidate. The first is MS Vat. et. 66. A relatively short manuscript of liturgical material, it also seems to have served as a sort of commonplace book for the community. In addition to a copy of the community’s Rule, composed in 1551, it contains a number of short historical notices on life at Santo Stefano, and was written by multiple hands across several decades, principally from the 1530s to the 1550s.³¹ Regarding Giovanni Battista, of interest is a reading from the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 1:1–16) on fols. 50v–51r bearing the following colophon: “I, Yoḥannǝs, [spiritual] son of [wäldä] our father Täklä Haymanot, of [zä] Cyprus, wrote this Gospel of Matthew; I translated it from the Latin” (figure 1).³² As a monk who came from Cyprus and was proficient enough in Latin to translate from it, this Yoḥannǝs matches known characteristics of Giovanni Battista.

A second codex belonging to Santo Stefano—a copy of the printed Gǝʿǝz psalter of 1513—goes far in confirming the identity of Giovanni Battista and Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus. Bearing the Vatican library shelfmark Stamp. Barb. A VIII 18, it is not part of the Vaticani etiopici collection and thus escaped the notice of Grébaut and Tisserant. But it certainly belonged to the community of Santo Stefano. A notice in Latin on the front flyleaf records its donation by “Marco [Marqos], prior of the hospice of Santo Stefano of the Abyssinians, near Saint Peter’s, on 5 September 1580.” The pastedown facing this front flyleaf offers the name of the psalter’s onetime owner: “This psalter belongs to Yoḥannǝs of [zä] Cyprus, [spiritual] son of [wäldä] our father Täklä Haymanot.” The name is identical to that in the Matthew reading in MS Vat. et. 66; the hand, too, appears to be the same. A Greek inscription on the rear flyleaf of the codex (fol. 110r) is the clue that connects Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus with Giovanni Battista. It reads:

ἔτος ἑφτα χιλϊαδές πετακοσιές πενϊταενάς· ἡμῶν | ἐγώ ὡ γιῶργακῆς τοῦ τοῦρμα ής στη ρομη εσο τοῦ μησερη ὶα|πατιστα τοῦ ήτιανοῦ (l. Ἰνδιανοῦ)· καὶ γραφο τοῦ ῆς θημηση δια να ξέ|βεύρει· καὶ να θηματε το καὶρο· καὶ εγο ο γιοργακῆς·ημέν ῆς | στο παχάλατι κὶ τοῦ κάρμηρει· καὶ το σπιτη μᾶς· ηνε ῆς στα ˋσˊκα|λϊα καὶ η μηταίρα μοῦ το ονομα τϊς κατερινά τοῦ οσκηλομακοῦ | καὶ εραφτι ῆς στίς όκτο τοῦ ὀκτοβειριοῦ:

[In our year 7550 I, Ghiorgakis of Turma, in Rome, in the circle of Gian Battista the Indian, write to be remembered by him: that he recall that I, Ghiorgakis, am in reduced circumstances and poverty; and my house is located near the steps, and my mother is named Caterina Sokilomakou; and this was written on the eighth day of October.]³³

There is good reason to assume that Ghiorgakis wrote this message, which was directed to Giovanni Battista, in Giovanni Battista’s own book—a book belonging, as its front pastedown attests, to Yoḥannǝs, son of Täklä Haymanot, of Cyprus. The given date of 7550 is curious, corresponding to no plausible date in the European, Byzantine, or Ethiopian dating systems. It may represent a scribal error, or an attempt to give the appearance of a suitably exotic Byzantine date. Plausibly the year 1550 AD was intended, and would accord with the known dates of Giovanni Battista in Rome.

This printed psalter is the only known source, Ethiopian or European, that connects the name Giovanni Battista to an Ethiopian name, Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus. That connection receives some additional support from the hybrid name by which Giovanni Battista apparently came to be known in his homeland. According to a European Cypriot who testified in 1564, Giovanni Battista was known on Cyprus as “Giovanni Battista Cipriotto.”³⁴ The epithet “Cipriotto” (Cypriot) makes little sense in the context of Cyprus, where it could hardly have distinguished one denizen of the island from many others. It makes more sense as a translation of the epithet he used among Ethiopians in Rome, zä-Qoṗros or “of Cyprus,” here combined with his usual European alias. All told, the available data concerning Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus accord with what we know of Giovanni Battista: his Cypriot origins, his fluency in Latin, his sporadic presence in Rome in the mid-sixteenth century, and his status as one of the Santo Stefano monks best known to non-Ethiopians in Rome. His handwriting, finally, as attested in MS Vat. et. 66, indicates that he was a trained scribe.³⁵

Two more documents make reference to a Yoḥannǝs qäsis (priest), whom we can confidently identify as Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus. The first reference appears in the first volume of the Gǝʿǝz Testamentum Novum (1548). At the conclusion of the text of the Acts of the Apostles, the editor Täsfa Ṣǝyon stated that the work had been accomplished “with the help of many translators, with the skilled priest Yoḥannǝs (Yoḥannǝs qäsis maʾmǝr) and with all the sons of baptism.”³⁶ A man also identifying himself as Yoḥannǝs qäsis was in Venice in December 1548, where he wrote to Täsfa Ṣǝyon that a Gǝʿǝz copy of the Pauline Epistles had been sent by the archbishop of Cyprus.³⁷ This text was crucial to Täsfa Ṣǝyon’s edition of the New Testament. Lacking any exemplar from which to print the Pauline Epistles, Täsfa Ṣǝyon had omitted them from the first volume of his edition, printed in 1548; only with the arrival of this copy from Cyprus could the Pauline Epistles be included in the second volume of 1549.³⁸ The hand of this letter is somewhat looser than that which copied the Matthew reading in MS Vat. et. 66, as would not be surprising in a personal missive, but it can nonetheless be identified as that of Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus (figure 2). The characteristics of this Yoḥannǝs qäsis also match our man. In 1548 he was a priest, but not prior; he was a skilled translator between Gǝʿǝz and Latin, as Täsfa Ṣǝyon observed; he was connected to Cyprus, and could report on the dispatch of manuscripts from that island. Indeed, it is very likely that he was responsible for requesting the manuscript from his Cypriot compatriots, and had gone to Venice, which then ruled Cyprus, precisely to oversee its arrival. These two notices demonstrate that Giovanni Battista/Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus was closely involved with Täsfa Ṣǝyon’s editorial projects, and well acquainted with Täsfa Ṣǝyon’s European collaborators, Pietro Paolo Gualtieri and Bernardino Sandri, to whom he sent greetings in his letter of 1548.

Yoḥnnәs of Qänt.orare

As for Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare (spelled with such variations as Qänṭärare, Qänṭärari, Qäṭorar, and Qäṭorare), this name appears in no European sources yet identified, nor should we expect it to: it was quite unusual for Europeans to refer to Ethiopians except by European-style aliases. Only the Gǝʿǝz manuscripts of Santo Stefano can provide information on his origins and career, and a half-dozen of them do.³⁹ MS Vat. et. 35 we have already had occasion to mention. Its colophon reads, “This book was completed in the days of Luke the Evangelist in the Year of Mercy 187, in the month of Ṗag^wəmen. It was copied by Yoḥannǝs, son of [wäldä] Qäṭorare, for the salvation of his soul.”⁴⁰ The intercalary month of Ṗag^wəmen in the Year of Mercy 187 corresponds to 24–29 August 1535 AD.⁴¹ A second and somewhat fuller identification occurs in MS Vat. et. 15, a composite manuscript whose first production unit (fols. 1–153) dates to the fifteenth century.⁴² Near the end of this production unit, on folio 150v, is the following acquisition note: “I, Yoḥannǝs, [spiritual] son of Abimos, of Qänṭorare, bought this book from Täsfa Ṣǝyon, son of Däbrä Libanos, in the presence of eight pilgrims. May whoever steals or takes it be excommunicated by the mouth of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.” This is immediately followed by the statement “I, Täsfa Ṣǝyon, said it.”⁴³ Since Täsfa Ṣǝyon clearly brought this manuscript with him to Rome and sold it thereafter to Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare, the acquisition note can be dated between circa 1536, date of Täsfa Ṣǝyon’s first notice in Rome, and his death in 1552.

MS Vat. et. 66, in its turn, identifies “Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorari” as rayǝs or prior of Santo Stefano in three notices.⁴⁴ A bequest recorded on folio 51va lists “rayǝs Yoḥannǝs, son of Qänṭärari” among its four witnesses; this notice is dated to the Year of Mercy 184, which corresponds to the anno Domini year running from September 1531 to August 1532. Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare was thus already prior of the community at this time.⁴⁵ Immediately following this bequest (fol. 51vb) is a second notice decreeing that the monks commemorate the feast day of Saint Stephen, which again identifies the rayǝs as “Yoḥannǝs, son of Qänṭorari” and is dated to the month of Mäskäräm in the Year of Mercy 185 (= September 1532).⁴⁶ Finally, on folio 1r was recorded another bequest naming “rayǝs Yoḥannǝs, son of Qänṭorare” as its recipient. If the date of the immediately preceding bequest also applies to this note, it was done in the Year of Mercy 187, or 1534–35 AD.

Several other notices refer to a rayǝs Yoḥannǝs without identifying him further. A record of donation on the front flyleaf (fol. I) of MS Vat. et. 25 affirms that the record was written “in the city of Rome by the tombs of Peter and Paul before 14 pilgrims under rayǝs Yoḥannǝs … in the month of Ḥamle … in the Year of Mercy 192, in the days of John the Evangelist.”⁴⁷ This date corresponds to July 1540. MS Vat. et. 5, a sixteenth-century paper manuscript containing the Catholic Epistles and the Epistle to the Hebrews, was donated by one Fǝre Mikaʾel to the community of Santo Stefano in the presence of seven monks, including rayǝs Yoḥannǝs.⁴⁸ Very likely this donation was made before 1548, when Täsfa Ṣǝyon published the first volume of the Testamentum Novum, for this manuscript served as his exemplar for the text of these epistles.⁴⁹ Finally, the Rule of Santo Stefano states that it was composed in a meeting of all the monks “together with our rayǝs, abba Yoḥannǝs, and our spirit and our teacher [mänfäsǝnä wä-mämhǝrǝnä], abba Täsfa Ṣǝyon,” and, in the conclusion, that it was done on the third of Mäskäräm (1 September) in the year 1551 “by the reckoning of the Franks.”⁵⁰ The explicit, paired mention of the names of Yoḥannǝs and Täsfa Ṣǝyon in this official document attests to the two men’s complementary and leading roles at Santo Stefano. Yoḥannǝs was rayǝs, a title that appears to have been in continuous use at Santo Stefano and that denotes the administrative head of the community.⁵¹ Täsfa Ṣǝyon was the community’s mämhǝr or spiritual teacher. Though this title was sometimes used at other Ethiopian monasteries to refer to the community’s abbot, we have found it attached to no other individual at Santo Stefano, where mämhǝr appears to have been an honorific reserved for its most distinguished and erudite member.⁵²

Taken together, these data inform us that Yoḥannǝs, “son of” or simply “of” Qänṭorare, also considered himself a spiritual “son of Abimos.” He was prior of Santo Stefano by 1531–32, so noted again circa 1534–35, and probably in this capacity bought Täsfa Ṣǝyon’s manuscript in or after 1536 The references to rayǝs Yoḥannǝs in July 1540, before 1548, and in September 1551, though lacking the epithet “of Qänṭorare,” are almost certainly to this same man.

Finally, there are the manuscripts or parts of manuscripts that Yoḥannǝs copied but did not “sign,” and which can be attributed to him on the basis of the hand. The full extent of his scribal activity will only be known when the Santo Stefano manuscripts have been thoroughly identified and studied, but even the data so far collected indicate that he must have spent many months at such work. In addition to MS Vat. et. 35, the only manuscript in which he identified himself as scribe, he copied MS Vat. Ross 865; both were evidently intended for personal or internal monastic use, and employ a rough, irregular, and somewhat old-fashioned script.⁵³ A number of other texts scattered in different manuscripts appear also to be in Yoḥannǝs’s hand, including the copy of the monastic Rule in MS Vat. et. 66.⁵⁴

Finally, as noted above, Grébaut and Tisserant have attributed MSS Vat. et. 1 and Vat. et 2 to Yoḥannǝs as well. These two are of particular interest in being related to the major editorial and translation projects overseen by Täsfa Ṣǝyon. In MS Vat. et. 1, for instance, Yoḥannǝs copied the text of the Four Gospels and the Ethiopian missal from the print edition that Täsfa Ṣǝyon had just published, and added a series of important “reference works,” including the Senodos, that is, a translated collection of early church canons.⁵⁵ His hand here is more controlled than in the “private” manuscripts described above; the manuscript itself is of relatively large size (325 × 233 mm) and free of the marginal notations so common in other Santo Stefano codices. Both the contents and the physical attributes of the manuscript suggest it was intended as a sort of master copy for the community, such as one might expect a prior to undertake—and one that took Täsfa Ṣǝyon’s new edition as its textual authority and antigraph. The majority of the contents (all but the computus, calendar, and a brief invocation of the Virgin) was completed by April 1549.⁵⁶ Yoḥannǝs then copied MS Vat. et. 2 directly from this master copy, and probably immediately afterward.⁵⁷ Here he included only the Nicaean and pseudo-Nicaean canons of the Senodos, prefaced by a table of contents in Latin that was doubtless written by one of the monks’ European collaborators. This second manuscript exhibits the same, more-controlled hand as in MS Vat. et. 1. It was very likely intended to be the presentation copy for Cardinal Cervini and Sirleto, who were quite interested in this text, not only because of the Latin it contains, but because there is some evidence it was in Sirleto’s possession in 1562.⁵⁸ These two manuscripts, therefore, indicate that Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare, like Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus, was involved in his own way in the Ethiopian-European collaborations that distinguished Santo Stefano in the mid-sixteenth century.

Yoḥnnәs of Qänt.orare and Yoḥnnәs of Cyprus/Giovanni Battista Compared

If we collate the data collected above, the distinction between Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare and Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus/Giovanni Battista becomes clear. First, the Gǝʿǝz evidence indicates that Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare and Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus could not have been the same person. For one, their handwriting is different; they used different scripts; and Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare, even in his more carefully executed manuscripts, remained the less accomplished scribe.⁵⁹ A second index is the differences in their self-identification or identification by fellow monks. Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare is never associated with Cyprus, nor is Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus ever linked to Qänṭorare. Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare never identifies himself as a spiritual son of Täklä Haymanot, nor does Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus ever identify himself as a spiritual son of Abimos. These distinctions hold true even when the two men are named in the same manuscript, as in MS Vat. et. 66.

Moreover, chronological data indicate that the monk known to Europeans as Giovanni Battista—even if he was not Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus—could not have been Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare. As we have seen, the latter was in Rome, and already prior, in 1531–32. Giovanni Battista was probably still a teenager, or at most in his early twenties, at this time, a very young man to be put in charge of Santo Stefano. (This is one datum suggesting that Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare was somewhat older than Giovanni Battista; another is the fact that Giovanni Battista was still living in 1565, whereas Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare disappears from the documentary record, at least as we now know it, after 1551) Yet more telling is the fact that in 1531–32 Giovanni Battista was not in Rome at all: by his own account, and whether or not one accepts his alleged voyage to the Indies, he was in Portugal.⁶⁰ Finally, Giovanni Battista’s subsequent travels, including three years on Cyprus (1535–38) and two years in Venice (1538–40), make it impossible that he could have served continuously as prior of Santo Stefano over these years.

A final proof of the distinction between these two men, and an important addition to our biographical information on Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare, concerns his identification with the toponym Qänṭorare and with the spiritual father named Abimos. The unfamiliarity of both names has doubtless contributed to the confusion between the two Yoḥannǝses, and we here set forth the available information on them.

Qänṭorare (also spelled in the manuscripts Qänṭorar, Qänṭorari) appears in the Acts of Saint Täklä Haymanot, at least in the standard version dating to the beginning of the sixteenth century.⁶¹ According to the Acts, Täklä Haymanot (d. ca. 1313), on a return journey from Jerusalem in the company of his disciple Arʾayännä Ṣäggahu, traveled to the land of Zälan. There he ascended a mountain (däbr) called Qänṭorar, which he liked since it was a “desert land” (mǝdrä bǝdǝw). Thereafter he went to Ḥayq (i.e., Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos on Lake Ḥayq) and Amhara, and then proceeded to the “mount” called Dada or Dǝda, said to be in the region of Sayǝnt. Having received an order from God to return to his native Šäwa, Täklä Haymanot left but told Arʾayännä Ṣäggahu to remain there.

The clear southern trajectory of this journey aids in locating Qänṭorare. Having returned to Ethiopia from Jerusalem (therefore from the north), the two monks first reach Qänṭorare, then Lake Ḥayq in the Amhara region, then Sayǝnt, a subregion of Amhara located west-southwest of Lake Ḥayq and bordering the Abbay River.⁶² We should thus expect Qänṭorare to be north of Lake Ḥayq. According to James Quirin, the land of “Zälan” in which Qänṭorare was located “may have been near Angot,” that is, directly north of Lake Ḥayq: Ethiopian Christian traditions associate it with Muslim groups near the Ifat sultanate and the Awaš River and identifyit as a land taken from the Christian Ethiopian king, suggesting it occupied a borderland between Christian Ethiopia and the Muslim sultanate of Ifat.⁶³

The monastic genealogy of Täklä Haymanot, a text closely related to and often circulating with his Acts, explains in its turn the link between Qänṭorare and the figure of Abimos. A particular, extended version of this genealogy presents the monastic history of Ethiopia from the point of view of the community of Däbrä Libanos of Šäwa, the sanctuary of St. Täklä Haymanot.⁶⁴ The saint’s disciple Arʾayännä Ṣäggahu appears in this text too, now described as the head of the monastery at Dada and as accompanied by his three “spiritual sons,” Abimos, Ǝndrǝyas, and Sälama. Abimos, moreover, is said to have gone to “Angot which is Qänṭorari.”⁶⁵ In addition to confirming the location of Qänṭorare in Angot, this text explains Yoḥannǝs’s self-identification as “son of Abimos.” A disciple of Arʾayännä Ṣäggahu, Abimos was probably the founder of the monastic community at Qänṭorare, or perhaps one of its early abbots.

Arʾayännä Ṣäggahu and Qänṭorare appear not only in the traditions linked to Täklä Haymanot, but also in those of the Ewosṭatean movement—specifically, in a monastic genealogy of Däbrä Ṣärabi, a monastery in the Ṣǝraʿ region of eastern Tǝgray founded by Ewosṭatewos himself in the first decade of the fourteenth century.⁶⁶ The earliest of three known (slightly variable) copies of this text dates to the seventeenth century. Arʾayännä Ṣäggahu appears here, not, of course, as a disciple of Täklä Haymanot, but as a fifth-generation disciple of Ewosṭatewos, and is described as “father of Qänṭorar.”⁶⁷ This designation suggests he founded the community himself, or perhaps (as in the Täklä Haymanot genealogy) was responsible for sending a disciple to found it. Thus both Ewosṭatean traditions and the traditions of the monastic network of Täklä Haymanot associate Arʾayännä Ṣäggahu with the foundation of Qänṭorare, though in different eras. In the Täklä Haymanot texts, he became a monk during Täklä Haymanot’s lifetime and thus in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, and sent his disciple to found a community in Qänṭorare; in this Ewosṭatean genealogy he is again responsible directly or indirectly for the founding of Qänṭorare, but in a decidedly later period (probably the late fourteenth or fifteenth century).⁶⁸

Two other, lesser known hagiographical texts make brief but important mention of Qänṭorare. The place appears as “Däbrä Qäṭorar” in the Acts of Mälkä Ṣedeq, a saintly monk from Šäwa and a contemporary of King Bäʾǝdä Maryam (r. 1468–78), which suggests that a significant monastic community may have existed in Qänṭorare by the later fifteenth century; no monastic affiliation is here specified.⁶⁹ Second, in the sixteenth-century Acts of ʿƎzra, famous head of the Stefanite monastery of Gundä Gunde (d. ca. 1520), ʿƎzra debates the monks of “Qänṭurare” on a point of theology.⁷⁰ Here, too, no monastic affiliation is given for the community.

It is clear from this evidence that a monastic community existed at Qänṭorare by the early sixteenth century at the latest; that its foundation was credited directly or indirectly to Arʾayännä Ṣäggahu; and that both the house of Täklä Haymanot and (possibly somewhat later) the Ewosṭateans claimed the community as their own. Qanṭorare may have begun as a daughter house of one monastic family and changed its affiliation over time. Alternatively, it may have been an independent monastic foundation, not closely linked to either the Ewosṭateans or the monastic network of Täklä Haymanot. That neither the Acts of ʿƎzra nor those of Mälkä Ṣedeq link it to a major monastic network might lean toward the latter conclusion. So might Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare’s self-identification as a “son of Abimos,” recalling an earlier abbot (possibly the founder) of his specific monastery, but not affiliating himself or his community expressly with either of the major monastic networks of his time. No location in the contemporary landscape of Ethiopia has yet been found that can be identified with the historical Qänṭorare. The community, located in a vulnerable border region, may have been deserted or changed location in the face of the devastating military campaigns of Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm al-Ġāzī (later 1520s–40s) or of the subsequent Oromo migration into the region.⁷¹

Conclusion

Both Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus and Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare were clearly prominent representatives of Santo Stefano in the middle of the sixteenth century, but their biographies were rather different, and illustrate the variety of origins and career trajectories represented among the monks of Santo Stefano. The former was a true product of the Ethiopian diaspora, born on Cyprus to parents who had met in Egypt. Though in his testimony to Cardinal Ghisleri in 1564 he made no mention of his monastic vows—perhaps considering the information irrelevant, or even impolitic, after his conversion to Catholicism—it is likely that he took his vows during his youth on Cyprus, and gained from the Ethiopian monastic community of Nicosia the scribal training he exhibited in later years.⁷² It was doubtless also during his youth on Cyprus that he learned the Arabic for which the pope praised him in later years; he might also have learned Latin and Italian there, Cyprus being in that period under Venetian control, although given his evident linguistic talent he could easily have picked these up during his subsequent years in Europe. Restless by disposition, as his frequent travels attest, and equipped with the languages to enter easily into learned European society, he soon developed relations with a series of increasingly prominent Catholic prelates who knew him as Giovanni Battista. As a “culture broker” between the European and Ethiopian Orthodox communities, he seems to have been second only to Täsfa Ṣǝyon. Unlike Täsfa Ṣǝyon, however, he converted to Catholicism, and it was as a Catholic Ethiopian that his fortunes rose highest. Chaplain and familiar of Pope Paul IV, familiar of and translator for Pope Pius IV, he ultimately acquired an episcopal position that promised to return him to his native Cyprus as a man of consequence and power.

Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare was in some ways Giovanni Battista’s opposite. A native of Ethiopia who had begun his monastic life in the borderland of Angot, he may have been spurred to leave his homeland by the turbulence that afflicted this region, and indeed much of the Christian kingdom, from the later 1520s. We have as yet no evidence that he had extensive contact with high-ranking European figures or acquired European languages. Nor did he ever master calligraphic handwriting, though he did often copy texts, for reasons of practical necessity, learning, and pious exercise. His scribal work, like his other activities—witnessing acts, acquiring manuscripts, establishing new liturgical rites, and overseeing the composition of the community’s first official written Rule—stemmed from his role as administrative head of Santo Stefano, and his two-decade tenure in this position suggests that he must have been an able administrator and man of sound moral reputation.

If Täsfa Ṣǝyon was the brilliant center of the Santo Stefano community, the two Yoḥannǝses stood just below him in importance, but representing the different facets of Ethiopian life in Rome that Täsfa Ṣǝyon balanced so well. On the one side stood rayǝs Yoḥannǝs, upholding the Ethiopian Orthodox identity of the community as guardian of its rituals and library and as enforcer of its rules. On the other stood Yoḥannǝs of Cyprus, talented and ambitious, like Täsfa Ṣǝyon a bridge between Ethiopian and European culture but one who, in his conversion and subsequent entrance into the Catholic hierarchy, adopted more fully a European identity.