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41-610: The 13th-14th century hagiography of Amhara saint Tekle Haymanot traces Bete Amhara as far back as the mid 9th century AD as a location. With the rise of the Solomonic Dynasty in 1270 under Emperor Yekuno Amlak , and until the establishment of Gondar as the new imperial capital around 1600, the Debre-Birhan to Mekane-Selassie region (Werillu in Wollo) was the primary seat of the roving Amhara emperors. This period

82-424: A pejorative reference to biographies and histories whose authors are perceived to be uncritical or excessively reverential toward their subject. Hagiography constituted an important literary genre in the early Christian church , providing some informational history along with the more inspirational stories and legends . A hagiographic account of an individual saint could consist of a biography ( vita ),

123-556: A description of the saint's deeds or miracles, an account of the saint's martyrdom ( passio ), or be a combination of these. The genre of lives of the saints first came into being in the Roman Empire as legends about Christian martyrs were recorded. The dates of their deaths formed the basis of martyrologies . In the 4th century, there were three main types of catalogs of lives of the saints: The earliest lives of saints focused on desert fathers who lived as ascetics from

164-697: A disproportionate role in the politics of the Ethiopian state. In the medieval era, the Tsahife Lam (ጻሕፈ ላም), governor of the Bete Amhara, was the most senior military officer next to the Emperor. Along with that, the Jantirar of Ambassel (the center of Bete Amhara and lordship of Yekuno Amlak himself prior to his ascension as Emperor of Ethiopia ), was tasked with protecting Amba Geshen . One of

205-560: A largely illiterate audience. Hagiography provided priests and theologians with classical handbooks in a form that allowed them the rhetorical tools necessary to present their faith through the example of the saints' lives. Of all the English hagiographers no one was more prolific nor so aware of the importance of the genre as Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham . His work Lives of the Saints contains set of sermons on saints' days, formerly observed by

246-530: A total population of 5,809 of whom 2,600 were males and 3,209 were females. It is the largest of three towns in Were Ilu woreda . While still ruler of Shewa , Menelik II had a ketamma (or fortified camp) built at Were Ilu and Enewari in 1869 to guard his northern frontier and pacify the Wollo Oromo , who were his neighbors. In September of the following year, after Menelik had recaptured Maqdala ,

287-432: Is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as well as, by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a preacher, priest, founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world's religions. Early Christian hagiographies might consist of a biography or vita (from Latin vita , life, which begins the title of most medieval biographies), a description of the saint's deeds or miracles, an account of

328-519: Is most significant in the formation of the medieval Ethiopian state, the spread and consolidation of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity (following the example set by the Zagwe kings in preserving the Axumite heritage) in Bete Amhara, Gojjam , Begemdir , northern Shewa , Gafat , and Damot (from Tigray , Wolkayt , and Lasta ) The region’s recorded history, in fact, goes back to the first decades of

369-574: Is said to hail from Woreilu . In a 1650 letter to the German scholar Hiob Ludolf (1624-1704), the Ethiopologist deservedly known as the father of Ethiopian Studies, Abba Gregorius describes himself as follows: "As to my origins, do not imagine, my friend, that they are humble, for I am of the House of Amhara which is a respected tribe; from it come the heads of the Ethiopian people, the governors,

410-452: Is the source of much of Ethiopia's clothing culture, eating culture, language, education system. An example is the fundamental modal system used by music of the Ethiopian highlands called qenet , of which there are four main modes: tezeta , bati , ambassel , and anchihoy . Abba Gregorius (1596-1658), the famous monk whose Jesuit association and global travels disseminated invaluable knowledge overseas about Ethiopia,

451-593: The Church of Scientology is commonly described as a heavily fictionalized hagiography. Were Ilu Were Ilu ( Amharic : ወረ ኢሉ ; Oromo : Warra Illu ) is a town in north-central Ethiopia . Located in the Debub Wollo Zone of the Amhara Region , this town has a latitude and longitude of 10°36′N 39°26′E  /  10.600°N 39.433°E  / 10.600; 39.433 . From

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492-604: The Cornish-language works Beunans Meriasek and Beunans Ke , about the lives of Saints Meriasek and Kea , respectively. Other examples of hagiographies from England include: Ireland is notable in its rich hagiographical tradition, and for the large amount of material which was produced during the Middle Ages. Irish hagiographers wrote primarily in Latin while some of the later saint's lives were written in

533-567: The Ge'ez language are known as gadl (Saint's Life). There are some 200 hagiographies about indigenous saints. They are among the most important Medieval Ethiopian written sources, and some have accurate historical information. They are written by the disciples of the saints. Some were written a long time after the death of a saint, but others were written not long after the saint's demise. Fragments from an Old Nubian hagiography of Saint Michael are extant. Jewish hagiographic writings are common in

574-526: The Martyrology of Tallaght and the Félire Óengusso . Such hagiographical calendars were important in establishing lists of native Irish saints, in imitation of continental calendars. In the 10th century, a Byzantine monk Simeon Metaphrastes was the first one to change the genre of lives of the saints into something different, giving it a moralizing and panegyrical character. His catalog of lives of

615-594: The telegraph line the Italians constructed between 1902 and 1904 from Asmara south to Addis Ababa passing through the town and giving it a local telegraph office, Were Ilu was connected north to Molale by only a trail as late as 1962. Branches of the telegraph line led from Were Ilu east to Ankober and west to Gondar through Debre Tabor . On 28 March 1990, during the Ethiopian Civil War , an aerial attack on Were Ilu by Derg airplanes destroyed

656-437: The 16th. Production remained dynamic and kept pace with scholarly developments in historical biographical writing until 1925, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (d. 1938) placed an interdiction on Ṣūfī brotherhoods. As Turkey relaxed legal restrictions on Islamic practice in the 1950s and the 1980s, Ṣūfīs returned to publishing hagiography, a trend which continues in the 21st century. The pseudobiography of L. Ron Hubbard compiled by

697-507: The 1870s, Were Ilu had a Thursday market. The Medhane Alem church, dating from at least from the early 1900s, is a notable local landmark. Empress Zewditu was born at Were Ilu, and Ras Habte Maryam was buried there. Based on figures from the Central Statistical Agency in 2005, this town has an estimated total population of 10,062 of whom 4,942 were men and 5,120 were women. The 1994 census reported this town had

738-518: The 4th century onwards. The life of Anthony of Egypt is usually considered the first example of this new genre of Christian biography. In Western Europe , hagiography was one of the more important vehicles for the study of inspirational history during the Middle Ages . The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine compiled a great deal of medieval hagiographic material, with a strong emphasis on miracle tales. Lives were often written to promote

779-683: The English Church. The text comprises two prefaces, one in Latin and one in Old English , and 39 lives beginning on 25 December with the nativity of Christ and ending with three texts to which no saints' days are attached. The text spans the entire year and describes the lives of many saints, both English and continental, and harks back to some of the earliest saints of the early church. There are two known instances where saint's lives were adapted into vernacular plays in Britain. These are

820-475: The Sikh Janamsakhis ) concerning saints, gurus and other individuals believed to be imbued with sacred power. Hagiographic works, especially those of the Middle Ages , can incorporate a record of institutional and local history , and evidence of popular cults , customs, and traditions . However, when referring to modern, non-ecclesiastical works, the term hagiography is often used today as

861-530: The Trinity) was begun by Emperor Naod (1494-1508) and completed by his son Emperor Libna Dengel (royal nom-du-guerre, Wanag Seged). This was a year before the church (along with a large number of monasteries in the region) was sacked in 1531 by a destructive Ottoman-backed invasion. Francisco Alvarez, who had earlier visited the church, confirms that its size was some 150 feet by 150 feet—wholly covered in gold leaf, inlaid with gems, pearls and corals. Astounded by

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902-689: The Wollo chiefs came to Were Ilu at the Mesqel feast to make formal submission and take an oath of fealty to the king and to Mohammad Ali , whom Menelik had appointed governor of Wollo. During the 1870s, Menelik resided at Were Ilu for extended periods. However, while the ruler of Shewa campaigned in Gojjam in early 1877, a rebellion caused by the intrigues of his consort Baffana led to Were Ilu being sacked and burned, and forced Menelik to return to Shewa. Emperor Yohannes IV met with Menelik twice at Were Ilu:

943-793: The case of Talmudic and Kabbalistic writings and later in the Hasidic movement. Hagiography in Islam began in the Arabic language with biographical writing about the Prophet Muhammad in the 8th century CE, a tradition known as sīra . From about the 10th century CE, a genre generally known as manāqib also emerged, which comprised biographies of the imams ( madhāhib ) who founded different schools of Islamic thought ( madhhab ) about shariʿa , and of Ṣūfī saints . Over time, hagiography about Ṣūfīs and their miracles came to predominate in

984-532: The cult of local or national states, and in particular to develop pilgrimages to visit relics . The bronze Gniezno Doors of Gniezno Cathedral in Poland are the only Romanesque doors in Europe to feature the life of a saint. The life of Saint Adalbert of Prague , who is buried in the cathedral, is shown in 18 scenes, probably based on a lost illuminated copy of one of his Lives. The Bollandist Society continues

1025-645: The first time in 1878 to accept his fealty; and a second time in 1882 to discipline him for disturbing the peace of Yohannes' realm by fighting with Negus Tekle Haymanot the Battle of Embabo . After Menelik became Emperor of Ethiopia and moved his capital south to Addis Ababa , Were Ilu declined somewhat in importance. Writing in the 1890s, Augustus B. Wylde described the Were Ilu market, held on Saturdays, as very large in size, with petty European goods and locally made cloth available; upon visiting its market, he

1066-522: The genre of manāqib . Likewise influenced by early Islamic research into hadiths and other biographical information about the Prophet, Persian scholars began writing Persian hagiography , again mainly of Sūfī saints, in the eleventh century CE. The Islamicisation of the Turkish regions led to the development of Turkish biographies of saints, beginning in the 13th century CE and gaining pace around

1107-512: The hagiographer's native vernacular Irish . Of particular note are the lives of St. Patrick , St. Columba (Latin)/Colum Cille (Irish) and St. Brigit/Brigid —Ireland's three patron saints. The earliest extant Life was written by Cogitosus . Additionally, several Irish calendars relating to the feastdays of Christian saints (sometimes called martyrologies or feastologies ) contained abbreviated synopses of saint's lives, which were compiled from many different sources. Notable examples include

1148-402: The hero-warrior figure, but with the distinction that the saint is of a spiritual sort. Imitation of the life of Christ was then the benchmark against which saints were measured, and imitation of the lives of saints was the benchmark against which the general population measured itself. In Anglo-Saxon and medieval England, hagiography became a literary genre par excellence for the teaching of

1189-573: The military commanders, the judges and the advisers of the King of Ethiopia who appoint and dismiss, command and rule in the name of the King, his governors, and grandees.” The dominant religion of the region was Christianity, in the form of Ethiopian Orthodoxy . As the state religion, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church played a critical role in the development of the region as a whole. Islamic knowledge and culture

1230-697: The mountains of Ethiopia where most of the male heirs to the Solomonic Dynasty were interned, the Emperors also kept the imperial treasury there even after it was no longer a royal prison. Bete Amhara was bounded on the west by the Abbay , on the south by the river Wanchet , on the north by the Bashilo - Mille River , and on the east by the Escarpment that separate it from the Afar Desert . The region

1271-486: The original life stories of their first saints, e.g. Boris and Gleb , Theodosius Pechersky etc. In the 16th century, Metropolitan Macarius expanded the list of the Russian saints and supervised the compiling process of their life stories. They would all be compiled in the so-called Velikiye chet'yi-minei catalog (Великие Четьи-Минеи, or Great Menaion Reader ), consisting of 12 volumes in accordance with each month of

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1312-405: The popular heroic poem, such as Beowulf , one finds that they share certain common features. In Beowulf , the titular character battles against Grendel and his mother , while the saint, such as Athanasius ' Anthony (one of the original sources for the hagiographic motif) or the character of Guthlac , battles against figures no less substantial in a spiritual sense. Both genres then focus on

1353-732: The saint's martyrdom (called a passio ), or be a combination of these. Christian hagiographies focus on the lives, and notably the miracles , ascribed to men and women canonized by the Roman Catholic church , the Eastern Orthodox Church , the Oriental Orthodox churches , and the Church of the East . Other religious traditions such as Buddhism , Hinduism , Taoism , Islam , Sikhism and Jainism also create and maintain hagiographical texts (such as

1394-517: The saints became the standard for all of the Western and Eastern hagiographers, who would create relative biographies and images of the ideal saints by gradually departing from the real facts of their lives. Over the years, the genre of lives of the saints had absorbed a number of narrative plots and poetic images (often, of pre-Christian origin, such as dragon fighting etc.), mediaeval parables , short stories and anecdotes . The genre of lives of

1435-643: The saints was introduced in the Slavic world in the Bulgarian Empire in the late 9th and early 10th century, where the first original hagiographies were produced on Cyril and Methodius , Clement of Ohrid and Naum of Preslav . Eventually the Bulgarians brought this genre to Kievan Rus' together with writing and also in translations from the Greek language. In the 11th century, they began to compile

1476-403: The second millennium. For example, St. George’s Church in the town of Woreilu (whose Tabot is reputed to have been carried by Emperor Menelik at the Battle of Adwa ) was established around 1200. The parish of Mekane Selassie (መካነ ሥላሴ), near Neded and the home of the famous cathedral by the same name, served as a favorite royal playground. The construction of Mekane Selassie (meaning: the abode of

1517-438: The study, academic assembly, appraisal and publication of materials relating to the lives of Christian saints (see Acta Sanctorum ). Many of the important hagiographical texts composed in medieval England were written in the vernacular dialect Anglo-Norman . With the introduction of Latin literature into England in the 7th and 8th centuries the genre of the life of the saint grew increasingly popular. When one contrasts it to

1558-694: The wealth and workmanship, the Yemeni chronicler of Ahmed Gragn notes: "The imam asked all the Arabs who were with him, ‘Is there the like of this church, with its images and its gold, in Byzantium , or in India, or in any other place?' They replied, ‘We never saw or heard of its like in Byzantium or India or anywhere in the world. Due to the origin of the Solomonic Dynasty in Bete Amhara, the regions rulers played

1599-511: The year. They were revised and expanded by St. Dimitry of Rostov in 1684–1705. The Life of Alexander Nevsky was a particularly notable hagiographic work of the era. Today, the works in the genre of lives of the saints represent a valuable historical source and reflection of different social ideas, world outlook and aesthetic concepts of the past. The Oriental Orthodox Churches also have their own hagiographic traditions. For instance, Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church hagiographies in

1640-571: Was impressed by the large piles of woolen goods for sale there, declaring that it "may be called the Bradford of Abyssinia". In 1895 Were Ilu became a supply dump, where the emperor stored about one and a half million cartridges and thousands of guns, as well as setting up numerous granaries, and it served as an organizing point for Menelik's army at the beginning of the First Italo-Abyssinian War . Although its location led to

1681-520: Was introduced to the region in the 7th century, when a group of Muslims were counseled by the prophet Mohammed to escape persecution in Mecca and travel to Ethiopia. A minority in the Bete Amhara were influenced by these Arab migrants and became Muslim converts. Hagiography A hagiography ( / ˌ h æ ɡ i ˈ ɒ ɡ r ə f i / ; from Ancient Greek ἅγιος , hagios  'holy' and -γραφία , -graphia  'writing')

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