The Ethiopian Sepulcher Letters
February 16, 2021
When Saumel Gobat, the Protestant Bishop of Jerusalem, died in 1879, an odd stack of papers was discovered among his effects. These were letters from the Ethiopian Emperor Sahle Dengel addressed to various Levantine and European powers, begging them for help with a peculiar and thorny problem. Judging by their text, Gobat was supposed to […]
The Wonders of Sir John Mandeville (the Mediterranean)
January 21, 2020
Sir John Mandeville was an English knight who claimed to have traveled broadly in the mid-14th century. Among other things, he reports soldiering in the service of the Fatimid Caliph in Cairo and for the Emperor of the Yuan dynasty in China. The actual extent of his travels is unknown, but along the way he […]