Annales d’Éthiopie, 2012, 27, 307-311 307 The other Ethiopia: Nubia and the crusade (12th-14th century)

Robin Seignobos *

The purpose of this paper is to examine the process of incorporation of Nubia into geographic culture and strategic horizon of the Latin West and its connection with the crusading context. These evolutions can be divided into three main chronological layers.

At the far reaches of the orbis terrarum : Nubia and Nubians in Medieval Latin culture (12th cent.)

The 12th century appears as the starting point in the medieval “ invention” of Nubia. While this name was not completely unknown during the Upper Middle Ages, it had passed almost unnoticed until the twelfth century, when the number of mentions of Nubia started to increase noticeably. Among the few Greco-Roman texts mentioning the Nubians, only Pliny’s Naturalis Historia was still read in the Middle Ages. Yet it turned out that Pliny’s encyclopædia was too big to be widely available in its entirety and, moreover, the name of Nubaei hardly emerges in the long enumeration of “ Ethiopian” peoples among which it appears. This section then develops three examples coming from various branches of medieval knowledge and showing the spread of the ethnonym and its gradual integration into the Latin lexicon. The first one deals with medieval world maps and more specifically with a textual description of a large mappa mundi composed around 1130 by the theologian Hugh of Saint Victor. Besides containing one of the earliest western attestations of the name “ Nubia”, this document indicates that such detailed mappae mundi may have played a part in acquainting the clerical and monastic milieus with this remote land, as early as the first decades of the twelfth century. The second example under scrutiny dates back to the same period but belongs to a different category of writing. It is a sermon entitled Veneranda dies and is included in the first book of the famous Codex Calixtinus kept in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (probably composed between 1132-1158). This text exalts