Ethiopia/Abyssinia

Abstract

When Father Francisco Álvares published his famed account of the first visit by a Portuguese, and indeed European, embassy to the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia (between 1520 and 1526), he gave it the curious title of True Information of the Kingdom of Prester John of the Indies. Only once or twice in the account does he refer to the lands he visits as “Ethiopia”, and “Abyssinia” is never used. He, like many European writers of that period, speaks of that regional and political entity as the “kingdoms of Prester John”