Ethiopian Miracles of the Virgin

 Ethiopia, in eastern Africa, has been Christian for longer than most of Europe.  The area was never part of the Roman Empire, but missionaries presumably made their way down there from Egypt, which was in the Empire and became Christian early.

Indeed, there has often been assumed to be a long connection between Ethiopia and Judea/Israel.  The Song of Solomon (love poems supposedly written by King Solomon, father of David, now usually interpreted as expressing Christ's love for His church), speak about his beloved as black and comely, and this is often said to indicate that she was from Ethiopia.  Did the queen of Sheba move to the Middle East from Ethiopia?  Hard to say.

Because Ethiopia was predominantly Christian in the Middle Ages, it had saints and miracle stories, just as Europe did.  And, again like Europe, the most common miracle stories involved the Virgin.  She was Mom, the one who would always love you no matter how bad you were.  God would judge you for your crimes, and Jesus was too awe inspiring to approach for everyday issues (he saved your soul and everyone else's, the church said, isn't that enough of a miracle?) but Mary was right there, even edging out the Holy Ghost as the "real" third member of the Trinity.

Ethiopia's stories of the Virgin, like those in Europe, may seem weird to the modern eye, because someone is very bad yet, because they pray to her, they are saved.  In Europe, for example, one of the most common stories was of a knight on his way to a tournament who stopped to pray to the Virgin and prayed so hard he lost track of time, but no problem! the Virgin put on his armor, rode his horse, and won the tournament.  Because she was wearing his armor, everyone thought it was him, and he won the prize.  In another, a monk rowed across the lake every night to visit his mistress, but he always prayed to the Virgin before going, so when his boat sprang a leak and he drowned, she interceded with God to save his soul.  Mom always will love you!

One of the most common Ethiopian stories, retold and illustrated multiple times, involved a rich lord who was also a cannibal.  (A little dig at the powerful there.)  After eating all his friends and family, he set off to find more people to eat, taking a water skin with him.  Soon he met a dying leper, who begged for a drink.  No way, said the cannibal.  The leper begged in the name of God, in the name of Christ.  No luck.  But then he begged in the name of the Virgin, and the cannibal relented and gave the leper a little water as he finished expiring.  Shortly thereafter, the cannibal too died (not clear why, but let's not spoil the story worrying about it, I doubt that he got sick from eating a dead leper).  The devil was all set to seize his soul, but the Virgin intervened, and he was saved.  Better pay attention when someone asks for something in her name!

Since both Ethiopian and European miracle stories can seem weird to us, maybe our role as historians is to stop trying to make the past fit our idea of what religion and society should properly be like and instead try to understand people for their own sake.

Wendy Belcher of Princeton University is leading a team studying Ethiopian miracles of the Virgin.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

The Physicality of Miracles

 As I've discussed before, miracle stories were very much part of the elite culture of the Middle Ages.  The stories were written by highly educated churchmen, and the doubters in the stories were the uneducated.  These were not superstitious imaginings by the ignorant.

Yet they seem weird to the educated today.  One of the weirdest things is often the physicality.  People are not just healed of afflictions, they are healed dramatically, abruptly, often painfully.  For example, when someone who had been deaf was healed and given hearing, blood routinely poured from their ears.  Someone whose body had been contorted, so for example their legs were bent permanently so that their feet touched their buttocks (a common element in accounts of miracles worked by the Virgin), their legs wouldn't just be straightened but yanked into position so forcefully that the person being healed would scream in pain, and blood would pour from their buttocks as the feet ripped away.

The real miracle, those writing the stories all agreed, was the moral and spiritual regeneration, but physicality got everyone's attention.  Someone quietly mending their evil ways would not inspire others to do the same, but going from so deformed that they had to be carried everywhere to leaping and bounding in delight at their healing certainly got everyone's attention.

 

The Virgin (seen above being crowned Queen of Heaven in a twelfth-century carving) could be counted on to help even the worst sinners, as long as they prayed to her and mended their ways after healing.  In one story, a monk who was supposed to keep track of the hours at night (so that the other monks could be called for the night liturgy) took advantage of being unsupervised all night to row across a little lake to his mistress's house for a quicky.

But one night (you can see where this is going) his boat sank and him with it.  But wait!  Every night before heading out on the lake he'd pray to the Virgin, and again when he got back.  So as the demons arrived to take the drowning man's soul, she fought them off, giving him one last chance.  Meanwhile, back at the monastery, the other monks realized they'd never been called for the night offices, looked for the man who'd been supposed to ring the bell, and realized both he and the boat were missing.  When his body washed up, they were sure he was dead, but surprise! he sat up and related his vision of being saved by the Virgin from the demons.  No more midnight quickies for him! you can be sure.

But suppose the Virgin didn't come through?  Of course one prayed harder, but again physicality played a role.  At one shrine noted for healings by the Virgin, pilgrims who had come to seek her aid would become irritated after a week or two if she didn't respond.  They would strip off every stitch of clothing and crawl on their bellies to her altar, asking people to whip them as they went, to show how penitent they were.  According to the stories, the Virgin always came through after such a clear demonstration.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Sanctuary

Medieval churches could be places of sanctuary.  That is, malefactors could hide out in a church and be (sort of) safe from attack.  It wasn't absolute, and there were no clear guidelines on where the sanctuary area began (church steps? the cemetery? the altar?).  One also had to hope that the priests or monks in the church didn't throw one out.

But because those in the church resisted bloodshed and capital punishment, churches could be good places to which to escape.  In the Merovingian era, when brothers and cousins in the royal family often plotted against each other, one prince spent months in a monastery hiding from his relatives.

But there was more to it.  One of the chief issues was conflict over jurisdiction.  Although it might seem confusing to us now, in the Middle Ages people had no trouble thinking of the landscape as divided into many different jurisdictions.  So you'd have the duke or count, the local castellan, several churches, maybe a city council, all claiming the right to have cases (both criminal and civil) heard in their courts.  Sometimes this depended on where the crime took place (or whose tenants the claimants were in a civil case), sometimes how serious the case was.

In England the situation was further complicated by the English sheriffs, who both prosecuted and judged criminal cases and who supposedly represented the crown.  Many French cities in the twelfth century worked out elaborate agreements between count, bishop, and city council over who had the right to prosecute which cases.

So the assertion of sanctuary was an assertion that the church had jurisdiction, the right to decide whether or when someone would be brought to judgment.  One interesting story that combined sanctuary with conflict over jurisdiction was told in the town of Bury St. Edmund in England.  Here the major church was the monastery that had the relics of Saint Edmund, a Christian martyr, and the monks collected miracle stories about their martyred saint.

Supposedly a wicked sheriff decided he wanted to prosecute a woman who had irked him (wicked sheriffs are found a lot of places besides the Robin Hood stories).  But she had sought sanctuary in St. Edmund's church.  The wicked sheriff was not happy about this and said, "Let's see who is more powerful, the judge [that is, he himself] in condemning people, or the martyr in freeing people."  (Given that this story was told by people recording the miracles of Saint Edmund, you can probably guess that it is not going to end well for the sheriff.)

So he sent his men into the church, pushing past the protesting monks, to drag the woman out.  The monks cursed them with all the curses of the Old Testament and called on their saint to "unfurl his war banners" and crush God's enemies.

The wicked sheriff stayed outside the church, in fact hiding behind a priest's tomb, in the hope that he would thus avoid committing sacrilege.  As you probably already guessed, this didn't work.  No sooner did his men drag the woman out of the church than the sheriff went mad, falling down screaming and foaming at the mouth.  His men dropped the woman, who quickly escaped, while trying to figure out what was wrong with their boss.  As if they couldn't guess!

He died shortly thereafter and was buried, but his body worked its way back to the surface.  It was widely considered that he was possessed by a demon, both in life and death.  Rather than let him further pollute the graveyard, the city council had him sewn into a calf's skin, weighted down, and sunk in the lake.

Stories like this underscored the importance of sanctuary and warned people about defying the martyr, as well as settling the particular case's question about who had jurisdiction.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval justice and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.