kingdom as an integral part of any future Portuguese move following David’s
appearance in Europe—and so should we.
Portuguese activities in Africa and the Indian Ocean were related to the
objectives and plans David had lauded in various places in Italy. As historian
John Thornton has summarized, “the search for Prester John and a route to his
lands was a way to find support behind the Muslim power of Northern Africa.”
This objective was interconnected with such other Portuguese goals as war
against the Muslims of North Africa, exploration of the Atlantic, and “develop-
ing trade in more prosaic commodities such as gold and slaves.”^48 Finally,
within the broader context, the Portuguese kings had only a few decades earlier
been commissioned by the Vatican to carry out the mission of finding the
eastern Christians.^49 For Western Christendom, eastern Christians were a bit
of an anomaly and represented the lost sons of the church. The quest was an
enduring mission that fed on rumors and encouraged travel.
Here, we have an intersection of the imperial and religious desires in the
region where the Red Sea runs into the Indian Ocean and the history of
communication between Portugal and Ethiopia and particularly the role of
diverse individuals in it. The Yemeni connection of the late fifteenth century
helps us to situate David within the context of Yemeni pilgrims reporting
rumors of Ethiopia as the land of Prester John and the ten lost tribes, but it
is in the early sixteenth-century Portuguese/Ethiopian context that David’s
plans finally fall into place.
The convergence of these various contexts in Ethiopia, the presumed
location of Prester John, was highly charged at the time of David’s arrival in
Rome. This was so not only for political reasons, but also for geographic ones,
which became meaningful for the first time in history with the coming of the
first European Christian imperial power to the region. Ethiopia was located
across the straits from Aden and was a gate to the Indian Ocean. It was also
located behind North African and Mediterranean Muslim powers. The Portu-
guese, therefore, were highly interested in finding access to the land of Prester
John and to East Africa, and they tried to obtain them by using both seafaring
and espionage. These Europeans were maritime pioneers off the African
shores, and the Portuguese did not waste any time as they completed their
Atlantic explorations along the West African coast—which would have yielded
a sea route to Ethiopia. They sent emissaries and spies to the Christian
kingdom through the Mediterranean and Egypt. On May 7 , 1487 , a year before
the return of Bartolomeu Dias ( 1450 – 1500 ) from his famous tour to the Cape of
Good Hope, the enigmatic Pedro da Covilhan (c. 1450 – 1530 ) left for Ethiopia
and India in search of Prester John.^50 Covilhan was not the first nor the last to
be sent to gather information, but his trip was the most remarkable. While he
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