chapter 14

Medieval Ethiopian Economies: Subsistence,

Global Trade and the Administration of Wealth

Anaïs Wion

Sǝmʿon, a ras or high-ranking officer of the royal court in the early sixteenth
century, was probably typical of the Christian Ethiopian aristocracy in his ma-
terial wealth and circumstances. He was unusual, however, in composing a
work, the Book of Gratitude, that chronicled that wealth and praised the Virgin
Mary for providing it. He thanked her for the lands that provided food for his
family, his servants, and his slaves; for the wood and water that were collected
for him, for the salt he was provided with, and for the animals, both domestic
and wild, that he asked the Virgin to maintain in their abundance. Through
her generosity he was able to exploit copper and silver mines that added to
his wealth, to own objects of silver and gold as well as precious gems, to build
churches, and hold banquets for “his people.”1 Sǝmʿon’s book is a useful source
for introducing our subject, for in its brief snapshot of one estate it provides
a window onto several interlocking systems of the medieval economic land-
scape that will be the main focus of what follows. The first, and the foundation
of the medieval Ethiopian economy, is the exploitation of the land – primarily
farming, but also animal husbandry and mining. The second is regional and
long-distance trade, only obliquely referenced in Sǝmʿon’s text, but doubtless
responsible for his possession of luxury objects including silver and gems and
certainly an essential feature both of Ethiopia’s internal economy and its con-
nection to a global one. Finally, conditioning both trade and the exploitation
of the land were the institutions, customs, and relations of hierarchy and inter-
dependence that profoundly shaped how resources were extracted, circulated,
and consumed, and the meanings attached to them. These are implicit but
abundantly evident in Sǝmʿon’s text, from the political office that provided him
with his land to his religious interpretation of his own prosperity to the house-
hold hierarchy in which he commanded servants and slaves but also redistrib-
uted his wealth to the community and to the poor in the form of banquets.

1  Getatchew Haile, “The Works of Rās Semʿon of Hagara Māryām,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies
38 (2005): 5–98, at 11 (text), 53 (trans.).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_015

396 Wion

These topics certainly do not cover all areas of economic activity, and in
the current state of research, even they can be addressed only in a prelimi-
nary and partial way. Most studies to date have relied principally on textual
sources, often anecdotal in their reference to economic phenomena and with-
out quantitative data. Individual texts, such as medieval land charters, offer
flashes of illumination, but given the diversity of Ethiopia’s ecological zones,
political-administrative structures, and social-religious cultures, they are best
understood as case studies whose wider applicability is limited. Particularly
elusive is the factor of change over time, and indeed, one tendency in the less
recent scholarship, where the Middle Ages are rarely the chronological focus,
has been to stress the unchanging character of agricultural traditions in the
interests of explaining Ethiopian economic “backwardness.”2 The scholars who
have addressed medieval economic issues, in any case, are quite few.
The pioneer of Ethiopia’s pre-modern economic history was the late Richard
Pankhurst, whose 1961 overview of the subject to 1800 drew on all the published
sources then available to treat an extremely diverse set of topics.3 Forty years
later, Pankhurst was still the expert assigned to write the vast majority of the
articles in the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica relating to the pre-modern economy,
a testament to both to his wide-ranging knowledge and to the relative quies-
cence of the field. Already in 1972, however, Taddesse Tamrat made a notable
contribution by drawing on sources not utilized by Pankhurst, such as hagi-
ographies and land charters, in the few pages he devoted to trade routes and
the gwǝlt system of land tenure in his survey of medieval Christian Ethiopia.4
Starting in the 1970s, Merid Wolde Aregay devoted his studies centrally to the
socio-economic history of Ethiopia before the twentieth century, approach-
ing phenomena such as war, social hierarchies, and demography as rooted
in a production economy. However, the relative inaccessibility of his works,
in particular his never-published thesis of 1971, have hindered recognition of
their truly innovative dimension, namely, to assert that a material history of
Ethiopia was possible.5

2  Richard Pankhurst, “Economy until 1941,” in EAe 2 (2005): 215–217

3  Richard Pankhurst, An Introduction to the Economic History of Ethiopia, from Early Times to
1800 (London, 1961). He addressed medieval economic issues again, more briefly, in the first
section of A Social History of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa, 1990), 3–72.
4  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (Oxford, 1972), 80–89, 98–103.
5  Merid Wolde Aregay, “Southern Ethiopia and the Christian kingdom, 1508–1708, with spe-
cial reference to the Galla migrations and their consequences” (Ph.D diss., University of
London, 1971); idem, “Technology in medieval Ethiopia” (paper presented for the conference
on Ethiopian feudalism, organized by the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and the Historical
Society of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, March 1976).