Background of Ethiopia

This book is primarily concerned with the Ethiopian Itineraries written down in and shordy before 1524 by Alessandro Zorzi of Venice. They contain valuable information about the geography of Ethiopia before its obliteration by Granh and the Galla invasions of the sixteenth century. Apart from the Ethiopian documents, whose geographical contents are incidental and often obscure, we have a couple of Itineraries, a couple of maps, and the narrative of Alvarez. All these earlier sources are useful in identifying the places mentioned by Zorzi and vice versa, so that it is necessary to give some account of them and of their historical background. I have already dealt elsewhere with Egyptus Novelo, ¹ and Alvarez is to be the subject of a forthcoming volume in this series, so I need not fully discuss the many difficult problems of his route.