On March 29, 1633, the Catholic Patriarch of Ethiopia left his home under the orders of Emperor Fasilädäs. Accompanied by a retinue of Jesuit fathers and other local Catholic, he had been banished to Fəremona, in the northern lands, from where he would ultimately be deported back to Goa. It was the beginning of the end; the end of the dream of Ignatius of Loyola himself of witnessing the reconciliation of the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia with the Catholic Church under the authority of the Roman Pope. The present paper deals with the ritual and ceremonial life of the Jesuits and the Ethiopian Catholics after being detained and escorted into exile. Although some recent studies have dealt with the last period of the Jesuit mission in Ethiopia, there is not enough research on the way that the missionaries coped with their defeat. During the year the Jesuits were taken captive under the orders of the Ethiopian Emperor, and until they were handed over to the Turkish authorities in the Red Sea, the Catholic Patriarch improvised ceremonies and rituals, invoked old personalities from the history of the Christian Church, in order to develop the conscience of a new martyrdom, and give some frame to the process of failure and defeat that was experienced by the missionary enterprise. In short, the paper explores the ceremonial daily life of a minority group of Christians in captivity, within a dominant Christian country that persecuted and finally expelled them.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 