Kingdom of Alodia

Four hundred churches

Drafted from Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile (2002)formation

In the 970s a Fatimid envoy called Ibn Selim al-Aswani went up the Nile past Makuria to the kingdom beyond it, and wrote a description. Alodia, he says, is larger than Makuria, its king more powerful, its territory more extensive, and its capital at Soba has fine houses, churches with much gold, and gardens. He gives the number of churches as four hundred.

That paragraph is a substantial fraction of everything known about this kingdom, and how much of it to believe is a live question.

What is not known

Nobody disputes that Alodia existed. There are churches excavated at Soba, Greek and Old Nubian inscriptions, imported ceramics, a royal seal, and an envoy's account of a functioning court.

What there is not is any evidence about how it worked. Not what the army rested on, not where the revenue came from, not who inherited, not on what ground a king claimed the right to rule. Makuria, a few hundred kilometres downstream, shared the religion, the script, the architecture and probably a great deal else, and a good deal more is known about it — but a neighbour's arrangements are not evidence, and filling the gaps from downstream would produce a kingdom that never existed anywhere except in the reconstruction.

So the gaps stay.

Soba

The capital is under the eastern suburbs of Khartoum.

Parts have been excavated — three churches, a large building that may be a palace, cemeteries, a great deal of pottery — and a good deal of the rest is built on. The site was mined for bricks for centuries.

That is the ordinary situation for a medieval African capital that happens to sit where a modern city grew, and it is worth stating because the alternative explanation for how little is known is the one a reader may reach for. It is not that nobody has looked. It is that the looking has to be done between houses.

Where it sits on this river

Four polities held the middle Nile in succession, and this is the least known of them.

Kush, from the eighth century BC, ruling Egypt and then Meroë, writing a script that can be read aloud and not understood. Then three centuries nobody can fill. Then Makuria and Alodia, both Christian, from the sixth century — Makuria holding the Egyptian frontier by treaty for six hundred years, this one upstream and, on the only account by somebody who saw both, richer. Then the Funj sultanate of Sennar, Muslim, which lasted until an Egyptian army arrived in 1821.

Nine hundred years of Christian kingdoms on a river a thousand kilometres above a Muslim Egypt, at peace with it for most of that time. It is one of the more surprising facts in African history and one of the least written about, and the reason is simple enough: for the southern kingdom there is a suburb, a scatter of excavated churches, and one visitor's paragraph.

A race up the Nile

Drafted from Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile (2002)expansion

The conversion of Nubia is one of the few episodes anywhere in which an imperial couple ran competing foreign policies against each other, and the sources say so outright.

Justinian was Chalcedonian. Theodora was Miaphysite. In the 540s both sent missions south to the Nubian kingdoms, and John of Ephesus — a Miaphysite bishop writing not long afterwards — tells the story from his own side: Theodora's missionary Julian reached Nobatia first because she had written ahead to the governor of the Thebaid instructing him to delay the emperor's party, and did.

Nobatia became Miaphysite. Makuria, the middle kingdom, took the Chalcedonian mission and went the other way for a time. And Alodia, furthest south, was converted around 580 by Longinus — Theodora's man again, working after her death.

Why it mattered which

Because a church is a supply line, and the alignment decided where the bishops came from for the next nine hundred years.

Miaphysite Nubia took its clergy from Alexandria. When Egypt became Muslim in the 640s the Coptic patriarchate continued under Muslim rule and went on consecrating bishops for the Nubian kingdoms — and for Ethiopia, whose metropolitan was an Egyptian monk appointed from Alexandria for the next thirteen hundred years. Two Christian establishments cut off from the rest of Christendom, both supplied by a third that was itself living under Muslim rule.

Chalcedonian Nubia would have been supplied from Constantinople, which after the 640s could not have reached it.

The alignment that looks in the sixth century like a quarrel about the nature of Christ turns out in the seventh to be the difference between a church that can be staffed and one that cannot.

And when the supply failed

That is also how it ended. The Coptic patriarchate under Mamluk rule came under serious pressure of its own from the thirteenth century, and the Nubian sees began going unfilled — first in Makuria and then here.

A church without bishops cannot consecrate priests, and a church without priests does not survive two generations. Alodia outlasted its northern neighbour by a hundred and thirty-nine years and went the same way, and what arrived at the end was not an army destroying a faith but an army finding that one had already run out.

What is left of it

Churches, mostly, and they are what the Soba excavations produced.

Three of them at the capital, one of them large, with granite columns, painted plaster and fragments of window glass. Ibn Selim al-Aswani's four hundred is not a number anybody can check and is not obviously absurd for a kingdom of this extent — Nubian Christianity built at village scale as well as at royal scale, and the churches along the Makurian Nile that have been excavated are numerous and small.

And a bronze hanging lamp, an inscribed bishop's tombstone, imported amphorae, and enough Egyptian and Aswan pottery to show the trade continuing through the whole period.

None of it says anything about how the kingdom was governed. It says that it was rich, that it built, that it read Greek and translated it, and that its trade with Egypt ran uninterrupted for nine hundred years.

What one visitor saw

Drafted from Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile (2002)peak

Ibn Selim al-Aswani went to Nubia in the 970s as a Fatimid envoy. The mission's business was the baqt, the ancient tribute arrangement between Egypt and the Nubian kingdoms, and having transacted it at Dongola he went on past it to the kingdom beyond.

His account does not survive as a book. It survives in quotation, mostly in al-Maqrizi four hundred years later, and that is the ordinary condition of Arabic geographical writing about places nobody went twice.

What he says

That Alodia is larger than Makuria and its king more powerful. That its territory is more extensive. That the capital, Soba, has fine buildings, large monasteries, churches with much gold in them, and gardens. That there are four hundred churches. That the country produces horses and camels, that the people have gardens and grain, and that the king can raise more men than the Makurian one.

He also says the Alodians are Jacobites — Miaphysite — that their books are in Greek which they translate into their own language, and that they have a substantial Muslim minority living among them.

How much of it to keep

The comparative claims are the load-bearing ones and they are also the ones a visitor is least equipped to make.

He had been to both kingdoms, which is more than almost anybody else who wrote about either. He had a diplomatic reason to assess a foreign ruler's strength accurately, which is a point in favour. And he was a Fatimid envoy describing the southern flank of a Muslim empire's frontier, which is a reason to notice strength rather than to invent it.

Against that: four hundred churches is the kind of round number that medieval writers used to mean a great many, in the way that an army is a hundred thousand strong and a king's herds are beyond counting. And "larger and richer than the neighbour" is a comparison that flatters the further place in almost every travel account ever written.

What the archaeology says about it

Not much, and what it says is not contradictory.

Soba's excavated area shows a substantial settlement with monumental churches, imported goods across the whole period, and enough scale to make "the largest of the three kingdoms" credible without confirming it. There is no royal palace identified with certainty. There is no archive.

The site is under the eastern suburbs of Khartoum and was quarried for bricks for centuries before anybody dug it, which is the ordinary situation for a medieval African capital under a modern city, and it means the problem is not that nobody has looked.

One man, once

The whole of the case for Alodia being the greater of the two kingdoms rests on one envoy who went there in the 970s, whose book is lost, quoted by a compiler four hundred years later, about a capital that is now under the eastern suburbs of Khartoum and was quarried for bricks for centuries before anybody dug it.

That is not nothing. It is one more witness than a good many places get, and he had been to both kingdoms, which almost nobody else had.

It is also all there is, and a kingdom described by one man once is not a kingdom anybody can say much about. What can be said is that he thought it was the larger, that he had no evident reason to say so if it was not, and that the excavations at Soba have not contradicted him.

The bishops stop coming

Drafted from Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile (2002)contraction

The traditional date for the fall of Soba is 1504, to a coalition of the Funj and the Abdallab Arabs, and the Funj sultanate of Sennar took the country.

The date comes from later Sudanese chronicle traditions rather than from anything contemporary, and the process it stands for was longer than a year. Arab groups had been moving into the Gezira for generations; the church was collapsing for the same reason it collapsed in Makuria, because Nubian bishops were consecrated in Alexandria and Alexandria under Mamluk rule could not supply them; and there are indications the kingdom had already fragmented before the Funj arrived.

Nine hundred years

Christian Nubia lasted from the sixth century to the sixteenth. That is longer than the interval between the fall of Rome and the Norman conquest, and it happened on a river a thousand kilometres up from a Muslim Egypt with which it was, for most of that time, formally at peace.

The middle kingdom fell in 1365 and this one in 1504, a hundred and thirty-nine years later. With Soba the last Christian state on the Nile above Egypt disappears, and the Christian tradition on this river ends after nine hundred years — not conquered in a war anybody records, but ground down by a demographic change, a bishop shortage and a sequence of raids.

What actually killed it

Not a war. Two slow things and a raid at the end of them.

The first was the church. Nubian bishops were consecrated at Alexandria, and by the fourteenth century the Coptic patriarchate under Mamluk rule was in no position to keep supplying sees a thousand miles up a river in a country it had no leverage in. Sees went unfilled. A church with no bishops ordains no priests; a church with no priests has, at most, two generations left in it.

The second was demographic. Arab groups had been moving into the Gezira — the land between the Blue and White Niles — for generations, by marriage and pasture and settlement rather than by conquest, and Nubian inheritance ran through the mother's line, which meant that the children of Arab fathers and Nubian mothers inherited from their Nubian uncles while identifying with their fathers. That arrangement transfers a country in about three generations and nobody has to fight for it.

By the time anybody arrived to take Soba there may not have been much of a kingdom to take.

A hundred and fifty castles

Drafted from Armenian, The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and Some Neighbouring Countries (1895)contraction

Two descriptions of the same country survive from either side of its disappearance, three centuries apart, and reading them together is the closest anybody can get to watching Christian Nubia end.

What was there

The first is a thirteenth-century Egyptian compilation, which gives the southern kingdom four lines.

Town of 'Alwah. Here there are troops and a large kingdom with wide districts, in which there are four hundred churches. The town lies to the east of the large island between the two rivers, the White Nile and the Green Nile. All its inhabitants are Jacobite Christians. Around it there are monasteries, some at a distance from the stream and some upon its banks. In the town there is a very large and spacious church, skilfully planned and constructed, and larger than all the other churches in the country; it is called the church of Manbali.

Troops, a large kingdom, wide districts, four hundred churches, monasteries on and off the river, and one cathedral bigger than any other building in the country, with a name. The crops depended on the Nile flood and the rain.

Nothing in that paragraph is the description of a state in difficulty.

What was left

The second comes from the chaplain of a Portuguese embassy that spent six years in Ethiopia in the 1520s, and Evetts's co-editor prints it in a footnote because it describes the same place.

Francisco Alvares never went to Nubia. He questioned a Syrian from Tripoli who had, and wrote down what the man told him:

There are in it a hundred and fifty churches, which still contain crucifixes and effigies of our Lady and other effigies painted on the walls, and all old. These churches are all in old ancient castles which are throughout the country; and as many castles, there are so many churches.

A country of abandoned fortified towns, each with a church in it, each church still holding its crucifix and its wall-paintings, and nobody using any of them.

The delegation

Then Alvares reports something he did see.

While we were in the country of the Prester John, there came six men from that country to the Prester himself, begging of him to send them priests and friars to teach them. He did not choose to send them.

The reason he gives is the mechanism of the whole disaster, stated by the one party who could have broken it and would not. The Ethiopian emperor's own metropolitan came from the patriarch of Alexandria, who lived under Muslim rule; he had his bishop from that source and could not manufacture clergy himself. How then could he give priests and friars, since another gave them?

Alvares adds what he was told about how it had happened. In ancient times these people had everything from the patriarch; it was a very long time since a bishop of theirs had died, and on account of the wars they could not get another, and so they lost all their Christianity. He notes, because he is writing for a court that would want to know, that the Nubians say there is much fine gold in their country.

What the pair shows

A church without a bishop cannot ordain. A church that cannot ordain runs out of priests in one generation and out of sacraments in two, and there is nothing the laity can do about it except send six men a very long way to ask somebody else.

Between the two passages lies the whole of it: a kingdom with four hundred churches and the largest cathedral in the country, and then a hundred and fifty buildings still standing with the paintings on the walls, in castles nobody lives in, in a country whose Christians had walked to another kingdom to beg for teachers and been turned down for a reason of ecclesiastical procedure.

Neither writer was there. The first says nothing about his sources and the second is repeating a Syrian traveller. That is the quality of evidence available for the end of a Christian kingdom that lasted the better part of a thousand years, and it is why so much of what can be said about Alodia has had to be dug up instead of read.

1504

Drafted from Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile (2002)end

The traditional date for the fall of Soba is 1504, to a coalition of the Funj and the Abdallab Arabs, and the Funj sultanate of Sennar took the country.

The date comes from later Sudanese chronicle traditions rather than from anything contemporary, and the process it stands for was longer than a year. There is no contemporary account of a siege, no letter, no inscription. What there is, is a tradition remembered by the people who ended up holding the ground, dating the end of the last Christian kingdom on the Nile to a year that is probably close and cannot be checked.

Nine hundred years

Christian Nubia lasted from the sixth century to the sixteenth.

That is longer than the interval between the fall of Rome and the Norman conquest, and it happened on a river a thousand kilometres above a Muslim Egypt with which these kingdoms were, for most of the period, formally at peace under a treaty older than almost any other in the world.

With Soba it ends. Makuria had gone a hundred and thirty-nine years earlier. What disappeared was not just two states but an entire branch of Christianity — with its own liturgical language, its own script, its own architecture, a body of literature in Old Nubian that survives in fragments, and nine centuries of bishops.

It was not martyred and it did not apostatise under pressure in any dramatic way. It ran out of clergy and was married into, over about two hundred years, until there was nobody left to be the church of.

Nobody wrote it down

The most striking thing about the end of Christian Nubia is how little anybody seems to have noticed.

There is no lament from Alexandria for the loss of two ancient sees. There is no crusading appeal, though Europe had been hearing about a Christian kingdom somewhere south of Egypt for three hundred years and had spent a good deal of energy looking for it — the Prester John of the letters was chased into Asia and then into Ethiopia, and the actual Christian kingdoms on the Nile went under while people were looking for a legendary one.

A civilisation that built four hundred churches, or however many four hundred stands for, ended without an obituary.

What was there instead

Drafted from Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia (1819)afterlife

In 1813 and 1814 a Swiss traveller calling himself Ibrahim ibn Abdallah went up the Nile on very little money, dressed as a poor Syrian trader, writing down the stages and the prices. Three hundred years after Soba fell, John Lewis Burckhardt recorded what had replaced the Christian kingdoms, and he recorded it without any sense that something had been replaced.

One sultanate, the length of the river

At Shendy, well up the river and in what had been Alodian country, he notes the arrangement in a sentence. The local king is tributary to the King of Sennaar, as are likewise all the petty rulers down the river as far as Dongola.

That is the whole political geography of the middle Nile in 1814: one Muslim sultanate, the Funj of Sennar, holding from the Ethiopian foothills to the Nubian bend — ground that had carried three Christian kingdoms for nine hundred years, now held by one Muslim one for three.

He describes the traffic on it as ordinary and busy. Caravans from Berber reaching Upper Egypt almost every month; Shendy as the principal market for slave traders out of Egypt, Darfur, Kordofan and Sennar; the roads secure enough that small parties travelled them. The Funj had made the river work commercially in a way that would have been recognisable to anyone who had used it under Alodia, doing the same things, in a different religion, with the same geography.

Muhammad Ali's Egyptian army took the sultanate seven years after Burckhardt passed through.

What it had absorbed

The kingdom did not leave a remnant population identifiable as its own.

The Christian communities of the Gezira did not survive as a minority the way the Copts of Egypt did. There is no Alodian church in exile, no diaspora, no liturgy preserved somewhere else, and Old Nubian went out of use in that part of the river altogether. What happened instead is what had been happening for two centuries before Soba fell: intermarriage, in a society where descent ran through the mother, until the grandchildren of the kingdom's own people were Muslims with Arab genealogies.

Burckhardt met their descendants everywhere and did not know it, because there was nothing left for them to tell him.

And Soba

The capital is under the eastern suburbs of Khartoum.

Its ruins were quarried, for centuries, by people who needed fired brick and had a supply of it lying in a field. Then the modern city grew out over the site.

Which is the last thing the kingdom did: it was taken apart and used, by everybody who came afterwards, until there was not enough left above ground for anyone to wonder what it had been.

The excavations that have been possible found three churches, a probable palace, granite columns, painted plaster, window glass, a bronze hanging lamp, an inscribed bishop's tombstone and a great deal of imported pottery — which is enough to confirm that a Fatimid envoy in the 970s was describing something real, and not enough to say what.