One morning, some time in the early 4th Century AD, Frumentius and Aedesius, two young brothers from Tyre, the Already Fading but once great city that Had given the world Europa, Dido and Marinus, arrived in the southern harbour and set sail for parts unknown.
They were accompanied by their uncle, a trader by the name of Meropius, The ship was headed for Egypt but the family's actual goal was Axum, the ancient empire of the legendary Queen of Sheba. Known for its fabulous wealth, at its peak, Axum occupied present-day Eritrea, as well as parts of Ethiopia, Egypt, Somalia, Djibouti, Sudan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Like generations of good Lebanese boys (and girls) to come, Frumentius and Aedesius had decided to leave the Homeland and find their fortunes abroad.
Even then, a millennia and a half before the Suez Canal was dug, it was already possible to sail from the Mediterranean to East Africa via a series of canals and seasonal lakes that linked the Nile to the Red Sea coast. This they managed with no trouble but just as they were nearing a port on the Horn of Africa, a part of the world still wracked by piracy today, their ship was boarded.
It was pillaged and the crew and passengers, including Meropius, were slaughtered. Frumentius and his brother were spared. Their relative youth made them valuable commodities and they were taken to serve as slave at the court of the Axumite king, Ella Amida.
After a few years, the boys managed to gain the king's favour and gradually their star rose. Although Aedesius never got much beyond being royal cup-bearer (he was probably the 'pretty' one), Frumentius eventually became Axum's secretary of state and treasurer. Things could have taken a turn for the worse when Ella Amida died unexpectedly but the brothers had obviously charmed their way into the entire royal household. As Ella Amida's heir, Ezana, was still too young to rule, the queen took over as regent and asked Frumentius to stay on to tutor her son until he was old enough to be king.
Frumentius was a devout Christian. Quite when his family converted isn't known. Tyre's first Christians date back to the visit paid to the city by Jesus that is mentioned in the Book of Mark. But in the 4th Century, the Old Ways still had followers and quite possibly continued to have them well into the early years of the Islamic Conquest, so he might have been a recent convert. Either way, Frumentius was a Believer and so he used his position at court to encourage trade between the Axumite Empire and the Christian countries to the north. He even managed to convert a few Axumites, in the process.
When Ezana was crowned, the brothers left Axum and made their way north to Alexandria. Faith, apparently, ran deep in the Familia Frumentius, for in Alexandria, Aedesius boarded a ship and returned to Tyre to be ordained and become a priest. For his part, Frumentius decided to stay on in Alexandria to seek an audience with Athanasius the Confessor (later Saint Athanasius), Patriarch of Egypt's Coptic Church. He told the Patriarch the story of his life in Axum, emphasising that in his opinion, the Axumites were ready to convert to Christianity. Thinking to return to Tyre himself, Frumentius then asked Athanasius to send missionaries to the kingdom. Sensing the young man’s zeal, Athanasius instead ordained the Tyrian and charged him with the mission to Axum.
And so it was that some time between 328 and 346 AD, Frumentius returned to the kingdom where, with King Ezana's consent, he and his bishops set up a church and set about converting anyone interested. Initially, there were few takers but when the King agreed to be baptised, becoming the first Christian monarch of Axum and Ethiopia, the floodgates opened.
The bond between the two men was clearly strong, for when Frumentius' teachings temporarily fell foul of edicts issued from Rome during a spat over Arianism, an early school of thought that denied the divinity of Christ, King Ezana ignored the Emperor Constantius' request that he be replaced as Axum’s archbishop.
Frumentius lived out the remainder of his life in Axum, dying in 383. Sometimes referred to as Abba Salama (Father of Peace), Kesate Birhan (Revealer of Light) or more simply as ‘Abuna’, the term still used by Arab and Ethiopian Christians to address priests, he is not only credited with founding the Ethiopian Coptic Church and converting a kingdom, but also for translating the New Testament into Ge’ez, a dead Semitic language that is survives only as a liturgical language used by some Ethiopian Christians and Jews.
Today, Frumentius is revered in Ethiopia as the man who converted Eastern Africa to Christianity and as the founder of the Ethiopian church. As befits an apostle of Lebanese origins - this is, after all a country that celebrates Christmas at least three times a year, thanks to the assorted calendars observed by Eastern Christians - he has four feast-days of his own; December 18th in the Coptic Orthodox Church, November 30th in the Eastern Orthodox and October 27th in the Roman Catholic Church and finally, August 1 in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
Not bad going for a man who began life as a trader’s nephew-turned-slave from Tyre.
