Ethiopian Christianity still has a distinctly Semitic character, holding to several Jewish observances: Saturday Sabbath, abstinence from unclean foods, and the circumcision of male infants. According to the thirteenth-century epic Kebra Negast (“The Glory of Kings”), the first Ethiopian emperor, Menelik I—said to be the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba—secretly moved the ark of the covenant from Jerusalem to Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church still claims to possess the ark.
Reklam
In this tableau, hiding in plain sight, was the rarest of things: a great story. If not an epic, then at least a piece of one, primed to unspool through the centuries into threaded derivatives, history into legend, legend into myth. I alone was the person to tell it.
In 1373 Chaucer was sent on a diplomatic mission to Italy to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Doge of Genoa and to conduct “secret business” in Florence. It was the year of Boccaccio’s lectures in Florence on Dante. Chaucer returned steeped in new material, but his epic of Troilus and Criseyde , adapted from Boccaccio, had to wait while he was dispatched to treat of peace with France.
Inevitably the effort to reconquer the Papal States collided with the expansion of Milan under the Visconti who had seized Bologna, a papal fief, in 1350 and threatened to become the dominant power of Italy. When the papal forces succeeded in regaining Bologna, Bernabò Visconti in an epic rage forced a priest to pronounce anathema upon the Pope from the top of a tower. Rejecting papal authority altogether, he seized ecclesiastical property, forced the Archbishop of Milan to kneel to him, forbade his subjects to pay tithes, seek pardons, or have any other dealings with the Curia, refused to accept papal appointees to benefices in his domain, tore up and trampled on papal missives.
how we all believed ourselves to be the hero of some personal epic, when in fact we were basically identical organisms colonizing a vastvand windowless room that smelled of lysol and lard
Reklam
Reklam