S2E19: The Fall of the Aksumite Empire Part 2: Gudit, the Woman who Destroyed an Empire

 

We've reached the end of our season on Aksum. As the Aksumite empire collapses back into a chaotic state of struggle between the church, nobility, and king, a mysterious woman from the north descends on the kingdom. Her name was Gudit, a rough portmanteau of Judith, the biblical woman who led an assassination of an Assyrian general, and Gud, the Ge'ez word for monster.

After decades of debate, most scholars have settled on the fact that Gudit was a historical figure, though the details of her life remain incredibly obscure. Her background varies in different sources on Aksumite histories. Some claim she is a disgraced Aksumite princess. Others state she was a Beta Israelite (Jewish) noblewoman from the kingdom of Semien. Many scholars claim she was actually Agaw, while others claim her origins can be identified in Somali and Sidama folklore. Can these contradictory origins be reconciled? Or is Gudit simply a character that we cannot understand from current knowledge.

The evidence for Gudit's historicity comes from a mixture of Aksumite and foreign sources. For example, the Coptic History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria confirms that a woman ruled the Ethiopian highlands after the fall of the Aksumite Empire. Arab sources make similar claims, that a woman dominated the Ethiopian highlands and engaged in political correspondence with the Najahid dynasty of Yemen. Local Ethiopian sources, including written church documents alleged to be contemporaneous with Gudit's rule, are compiled in the church histories of Tekle Hayamanot. Additionally, the oral histories of the Sidama, Agaw, and Somali peoples feature tales of female tyrants who ruled over their male subjects with an iron fist. While these women are rarely explicitly identified as Gudit, their similar era of existence has led many scholars to conclude that Gudit and these women are different historical identities for the same figure.

The details of Gudit's life as presented by scholars are somewhat contradictory. One of the most well known stories that attempts to explain Gudit's future enmity towards the Aksumite church and state claims that Gudit's branch of the royal family fell on hard financial times when they were passed over in the royal succession. To earn money, Gudit began to work as a prostitute. However, Gudit was no woman of the night, but is rather thought of as a highly desired escort. When Gudit received the attraction of an Aksumite deacon, she rejected him, but offered him the challenge of making for her gilded sandals and a gilded parasol to win her affection. He accepted the challenge, but decided to use a holy relic, a golden cloth donated to the church by Saint Ezana himself, to fashion these items. When the locals of Aksum discovered the deacons sacrilegious actions, they blamed Gudit for their destruction. An angry mob mutilated one of her breasts to ensure that she could never seduce men with her beauty again before exiling her from the city.

The Queen Gudit Stele Field. Despite its name, the site's actual relationship to Gudit herself is tenuous.
Photo Courtesy of Wolff Chronicles

However, Gudit did not peacefully accept her exile. After years of planning she returned to Aksum when her spies within the city informed her of government instability. She returned with an army, though the origins of this army vary depending on the version of the story. Traditional accounts claim that Gudit rode with the support of a Syrian Arab prince, but Arab records do not indicate any sort of intervention in Ethiopia during this time. For this reason, most scholars believe that Gudit led an alliance of Aksum's various enemies. The recent revival of Aksumite expansion, the theory goes, led to the formation of an informal anti-Aksumite coalition among the Sidama, Semien, Harla, and possibly some Agaw peoples. This coalition defeated the Aksumite king in battle, and began a reign of terror over the former Aksumite empires. Churches, palaces, and monasteries were laid waste to, and anyone with even a vague relation to the Aksumite royal family was hunted down and eliminated.

That is, unless, you believe the later retellings by the Ethiopian Orthodox church and the Solomonic dynasty. They claim that one member of the Aksumite royal dynasty, Del Naod, escaped Gudit's wrath by fleeing into the Amhara country, where he sired the descendants who would later form the Solomonic dynasty. However, most academic scholars dismiss this story as royal propaganda to link the Solomonic dynasty to Aksum.

Gudit's religion is also a subject of immense debate. Ethiopian tradition generally states that she is Jewish, usually claiming that she converted to the faith after marrying a Jewish spouse. Aksumite church records seem to support this interpretation, with many supposedly contemporary documents compiled by church historian Tekle Hayamanot forthrightly identify her as Jewish, and one even claims that her Jewish beliefs motivated her to convert several churches into synagogues. However, her biographical similarities to several non-Jewish queens from this era has led some scholars to question this interpretation. In this episode, I support the hypothesis that Gudit converted to multiple faiths for the sake of political convenience. That among the Beta Israelites, she professed Judaism, while among the Harla she professed Islam and among the Sidama she professed belief in Paganism. This would explain why her supposed aliases profess so many different faiths, as well as why Arab and Coptic sources are less consistent in identifying her faith than Aksumite records.