S2E8: Ezana's Conquest of Nubia

King Ezana's Funerary Stela

In this week's episode, King Ezana will deal with the fallout of the decisions made in the first half of his reign and somehow emerge from these challenges in an even stronger position than before.

Note: The Blemmyes were another nomadic people who invaded Nubia during the end of Meroe. Where exactly their realm ended and Nobatia's began is not clear.

The first of these challenges was overcoming the religious tensions that emerged with Aksum's conversion to Christianity. While the peasantry and nobility of Aksum were surprisingly receptive to the change, Aksum's Jewish population was unwilling to convert. In the face of increasingly aggressive missionary efforts, the Jews of Aksum fled to the Semien mountains, where they proclaimed a man named Phineas to be their king. Despite now having a kingdom of their own, however, the Aksumite Jews continued to pay taxes to Ezana. In the end, this exodus to the Semien mountains ended up working out well for everyone. The Jews could avoid persecution and conversion, while the Aksumites could continue to profit from their taxation. 

To the North, Ezana had to decide what position Aksum would support in the theological controversies that were ailing Roman Christianity. Coincidentally for our podcast, this controversy was, itself, incited by the teachings of an African. Arius was a Berber theologian from the region of modern Libya, then a part of the Roman Empire. He believed that, before the creation of the world, there was a time when God the Father existed without God the Son. This notion, while it seems esoteric and unimportant to us today, was an incredibly controversial belief in the 4th century. Arius' school of thought always remained a minority view in the Roman Empire, but caught on strongly among certain portions of the Roman populous, especially among the Germanic tribes and the Roman legions.

Arius "The Heretic"

During the reign of the Roman emperor Constantius, Arian Christianity became the dominant sect within the imperial court. Ezana's tutor and bishop Frumentius, however, was a Nicene Christian. As part of a wider purge of Nicenes from Rome's government and religious institutions, Constantius tried to pressure Ezana to remove Frumentius as the Abuna, or patriarch, of Aksum. This demand was refused, indicating that, even in this early state, East African Christianity enjoyed independence from Roman religious authorities. This is an important distinction, as the fact that Frumentius was appointed from Alexandria and practiced Nicene Christanity might make you think that Aksumite Christianity was just an extension of the Roman faith. However, with Ezana's refusal to dismiss Frumentius, it becomes clear that Roman religious authorities held no true power over the Aksumite church.

Some of Meroe's famous pyramids

At the tail-end of his reign, Ezana encountered a crisis with his Northwestern neighbor, the Nubian kingdom of Meroe. Meroe was a kingdom in decline since even before Ezana took the throne. A series of wars between the kingdom and Rome throughout the first centuries BC and AD severely hurt the kingdoms economic prospects, and forced the Meroites to give away significant portions of valuable farmland to repatious mercenaries. Throughout the early centuries AD, things got worse for Meroe as Aksum began to outcompete the Meroites in the trade of African goods like ebony wood, ivory, exotic animals, and, of course, incense. The treasury of Meroe was, at this point, relying entirely on the import tariffs that they levied on Aksumite and Roman merchants, much to the chagrin of these merchants. However, with the reduction of piracy and the construction of Gadarat's road on the Red Sea coast, these merchants could bypass Nubia altogether, drying up Meroe's last source of revenue. Early in Ezana's rule, he had already taken advantage of Meroe's weakness once when he used their land as a bargaining chip in the resettlement of the coastal Beja population. However, when a Nubian militia made an encroachment on Aksumite elephant hunting grounds, it gave Ezana an excuse to invade Meroe. With Meroe destroyed, a new Askumite client arose in the city of Soba. Soba became the capital of Alodia. This kingdom would itself last for almost a millennium, finally collapsing in the 14th century AD. 

Ruins of an Alodian fort outside Soba, Sudan

Ezana, despite his Christian faith, was buried in a traditional Aksumite pagan ceremony. However, he would ultimately be the last Aksumite king to be buried in this way. Next episode, we will focus on the life of Mehadyis, the Zealot king of Aksum who made it his mission to destroy the remnants of Aksumite paganism.