Jerónimo Lobo

Jerónimo Lobo (1595– 29 January 1678) was a Portuguese Jesuit missionary. He took part in the unsuccessful efforts to convert Ethiopia from the native Ethiopian church to Roman Catholicism until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1643. Afterwards he wrote an account of his time in Ethiopia, Itinerário, which is an important source for the history and culture of that country.

Life

He was born in Lisbon the third of at least five sons and six daughters to Francisco Lobo da Gama, the Governor of Portuguese Cape Verde, and Maria Brandão de Vasconcelos. He entered the Order of Jesus at the age of 14. In 1621 he was ordained a priest and was ordered as a missionary to India, and after surviving an attack on the fleet carrying him by English and Dutch ships off Portuguese Mozambique a year later, he arrived at Goa in December 1622.

With the intention of proceeding to Ethiopia, whose Nəgusä nägäst Susenyos I had been converted to Roman Catholicism by Pedro Páez, he left India in 1624. He struggled to overcome the difficulty that Ethiopia controlled none of the northern coastline, first disembarking at Pate and attempted to reach his destination along the Jubba River through country controlled by the Oromo, but was forced to return. Then in 1625 he set out again, accompanied by Afonso Mendes, the Catholic Patriarch of Ethiopia, and eight missionaries, landing at Beilul, a port on the coast of the Red Sea controlled by the king of the Afars. vassal to the Emperor of Ethiopia. After a month spent crossing the desert into the Ethiopian highlands, the party reached Fremona, where Lobo assumed the responsibilities of superintendent of the missions in Tigray.