400 exploration: Africa explore the vast regions of the Middle East and western Asia Missionaries were sent to explore these regions and win converts, and schools were established in Europe to teach the languages of these regions Travelers, many of them dispatched by the Christian pope, returned with a new understanding of geography The movement of people and ideas was not one way At the same time, Asian explorers and conquerors were exploring the lands to their west Arabic Muslims made voyages of exploration into eastern Europe and India, and African Muslims made similar voyages, usually in the form of pilgrimages, to the Middle East All of this exploratory activity led to the diffusion of people and ideas, contacts with new cultures and ideas, and a general shrinking of the world as people were beginning to understand, often for the first time, that new lands, new cultures, and new peoples could be found over the horizons Africa by Bradley A Skeen Africans from south of the Sahara did not engage in the kind of systematic exploration conducted, for instance, by the European state of Portugal Beginning in the 1440s Portugal sent fleets of ships to reconnoiter the African coast and eventually find a new route to Asia around the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of the continent Undoubtedly, many Africans were trailblazers who were led by restlessness or circumstances to discover fresh pastures and farmlands and new trade routes During the Middle Ages the Bantu peoples especially spread out across Africa, but those explorers remain unknown to us Africans did, however, become caught up in Portugal’s network of exploration and trade that extended along the coasts of their nations, and African ambassadors traveled to Lisbon and Rome for the first time Ethiopia was isolated as the only traditionally Christian country in Africa surrounded by hostile Muslim states The Ethiopian government and the Catholic Church, therefore, found it expedient to send representatives to Europe, seeking a new horizon of diplomacy and learning In the Middle Ages the first Africans brought to Europe were slaves, traded across the Sahara and then from Islamic ports on the Mediterranean to cities in Spain and Italy As in most slaveholding cultures, a small number of the enslaved Africans in Europe managed to obtain their freedom For them their traumatic journey ended with the discovery of a personal new world that brought them lives and experiences far different from anything they could have experienced in Africa The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (r 1212–50) had a corps of black trumpeters at his court that made a display of the cosmopolitan character and power of his rule, though the trumpeters’ status as slaves or free men is unknown The spread of Islam to northwestern Africa and Arabia isolated Ethiopia as a Christian country, bringing to an end its monopoly on the Indian Ocean trade between Europe and Asia As a result, Ethiopian culture and politics turned inward In the later Middle Ages, however, Ethiopia began to make efforts to contact the Christian world of western Europe, especially after the Crusades displayed European military power in the Near East Ethiopia began to look to Christian Europe as an ally against Islam and so sent envoys into an unknown wider world Emperor Lalibela of Ethiopia (r 1185–1225) was posthumously made a saint in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Several centuries after his death the Gadla Lalibla, a hagiography of the emperor, was composed According to that tract, he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in his youth, perhaps during a period of political exile, before Muslim forces took the city from the crusaders According to the same source, after hearing of the loss of the city by the Christians, Lalibela was ordered by God in a dream to build a new Jerusalem on the site of his home city of Roha and rename it after himself In the city of Lalibela he built the famous rock-hewn churches of Ethiopia, drawing on his exploration of the wider Christian world beyond Ethiopia Emperor Lalibela’s pilgrimage was a precursor to a tradition of religious pilgrimages and diplomatic journeys by Ethiopians that became more prevalent after the founding of a new dynasty in 1270 (which claimed descent from King Solomon through the Queen of Sheba) and reached a peak in the 15th century The first Ethiopian diplomatic mission to Europe toured Rome, Genoa, and Avignon in 1306 (It is uncertain whether they also visited any of the Spanish kingdoms.) Ethiopia had already sought a military alliance with European powers against the common enemy of the Islamic states on the Mediterranean Ethiopian representatives attended the Council of Florence in 1441, invited by the pope to help in unifying Christendom Thereafter the tempo of Ethiopian diplomatic activity increased In the mid- to late 15th century Emperor Zara Yakob sent ambassadors to the Vatican, Venice, Milan, and Florence as well as to Lisbon The emperor directed the ambassadors to act as diplomats and to increase his prestige at home and abroad In addition, he charged the ambassadors with soliciting scholars and technical experts to join the Ethiopian court and with asking European rulers to donate sophisticated weapons and other technological devices for Ethiopians to copy as well as technical books and texts describing advances in scholarly disciplines, such as geography and theology Em-