Pedro Páez

Pedro Páez

Pedro Páez Jaramillo (* 1564 in Olmeda de las Fuentes , Spain ; † May 22, 1622 in Gorgora , Ethiopia ) was a Jesuit missionary in Ethiopia. He was born in a Castilian village called Olmeda de la Cebolla 50 km east of Madrid , in 1582 at the age of only 18 he joined the Jesuit order and studied in Coimbra , Portugal .

Life

In 1588 he was initially a missionary in the Jesuit monastery in the Indian port city of Goa (India), which had belonged to the Portuguese colony since 1510, and was sent from there to Ethiopia. On the way he was captured by Arabs and sold as a slave. His imprisonment lasted a total of seven years, which he used to learn Arabic fluently . Then he was ransomed and returned to Goa for some time before setting off again and finally arriving in Massaua in 1603 . From there he traveled to Fremona , the then headquarters of the Jesuits in Ethiopia. When he the court of the Negus Za Dengel was called, his knowledge of the impressed Amharic and old Ethiopian , and the Ethiopian customs the young ruler so much that this is decided, for Catholicism to convert - although Páez advised him to this decision not too quickly known to be let. When Za Dengel announced changes in Sabbath observation , Paez retired to Fremona, where he awaited the outcome of the resulting civil war that ended with the emperor's death.

This precaution benefited Páez when Sissinios , who ascended the throne in 1607, invited him to his court and later became friends with him. Sissinios left him a piece of land on the Gorgora peninsula on the north bank of Lake Tana , where he built a new Jesuit center with a stone church. Finally, before his own death in 1622, Páez succeeded in converting Sissinios to Catholicism.

Some of the Catholic churches designed by Páez still stand today and have influenced Ethiopian architecture.

He was the first European to discover Lake Tana , which is considered a source of the Blue Nile . He wrote:

“First I see two small springs, each about the size of two hand spans. What neither Cyrus , the King of the Persians, nor Cambyses , nor Alexander the Great , nor the important Julius Caesar could ever discover, I see now. The second spring is a stone's throw from the first. The sources of the Nile can be found in the upper part of a valley surrounded by mountains. "

In 1620 Páez wrote a work on the history of Ethiopia ( História da Ethiópia ), which was published in Volumes II and III by Camillo Beccaris in Rome as Rerum Aethiopicarum Scriptores occidentales Inedtii (1905-1917). The work was republished in 1945 in Porto by Sanceau, Feio and Teixeira under the title Péro Pais: História da Etiópia .

Páez translated the catechism into the Ethiopian language . He is also believed to be the author of De Abyssinorum erroribus .

literature

• George Bishop: The Travels and Adventures of Pedro Paez . SJ, Biografía novelada de los viajes de Pedro Páez.
• Heinrich Scholler, Stefan Brüne: On the way to modern Ethiopia . LIT Verlag, Berlin / Hamburg / Münster 2005, ISBN 978-3-8258-9075-9
• Paez, Pedro . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 20 : Ode - Payment of Members . London 1911, p. 448 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Pedro Páez Jaramillo. Real Academia de la Historia, accessed August 4, 2018 (Spanish). 
2. ↑ Pedro Páez community information Olmeda de las Cebollas ( Memento of the original from April 26, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Spanish) 
3. ↑ According to Gerhard Konzelmann : The Nile - holy river under sun barge, cross and crescent moon . dtv, Munich 1985, p. 217