Still Oviedo was far from being reduced to silence. Treatise after treatise was published on the controversy, to confound the minds of the Ethiopians. The errors of the Alexandrian faith were fiercely attacked in every form and fashion; and the superior beauties of the Catholic religion fully expounded. But no advantage resulted. Rejoinders and confutations followed fast from the insulted clergy; and the bishop, furious at the thoughts of his futile exertions to gain a footing in the country—entertaining no hope of making one single convert, whether among prince or people—resolved upon a last effort in the struggle. On the fifth of February, 1559, he issued his spiritual ban over the land, proclaiming that the entire nation of Abyssinia, high and low, learned and ignorant, having refused to obey the church of Rome—practising the unholy rite of circumcision—scrupling to eat the flesh of the hog and the hare—and indulging in many other flagrant enormities—were delivered over to the judgment of the spiritual court, to be punished in person and goods, in public and in private, by every means the faithful could devise.
But the folly of issuing this curious rescript without any means of enforcing it was fully appreciated; and the tyrannical conduct of the bishop did but serve to strengthen the Emperor in the bonds of his own faith, finding, as was observed by an historian of the times, “that popery and its wiles were the more dangerous and reprehensible, as the veil was withdrawn from before the spirit of her tenets.”
There is every reason to believe that the succeeding invasion of the Adaïel was procured through the treacherous designs of the Jesuits, but the event again proved disastrous to their cause. Although the revenge of the baffled bishop was allayed in a torrent of blood, yet the death of the mild, moderate, and liberal Claudius, who perished on the battlefield, shed a baneful influence on their ensuing efforts; and the sceptre devolved into the hands of his brother Adam, a haughty and vindictive prince, who is depicted in Portuguese records as “cruel and hard of heart, and utterly insensible to the beauteous mysteries of the Catholic faith.”
Swearing vengeance against the Latins, to whose treason he attributed the murder of his brother and the ruin of his country, the new monarch seized all the estates which had been granted to the Portuguese for rendered service, and threatened the bishop and his colleagues with instantaneous death if they presumed to propagate the errors of the Romish church; and on a humble remonstrance being attempted, in the violence of his wrath, he rushed upon the missionary with a drawn sword, vowing to immolate him upon the spot. “The weapon, however,” say the holy fathers, “dropped miraculously from his impious hand,” and for a season the last extremity of vengeance was exchanged for a system of vile durance.
Portuguese troops in the meantime arrived from Goa, and the Bahr Negásh, “the lord of the sea-coast,” bought over by the gold of India, and stirred up by the wily emissaries of the viceroy, assembled his forces in rebellion. Marching with his European allies to the capital, he defeated and slew the Emperor in a pitched battle, and rescued the Jesuit missionaries from their unpleasant captivity.
Warned by former difficulty and distress, the worthy fathers now assumed a more modest and humble demeanour, and were allowed to settle again in their old haunt of Maiguagua, where they remained for a time unmolested by the new Emperor Malek Sáshed, who inherited all the horror of his father to the Catholic creed, although tempered by the mildness of his uncle Claudius. But the jealous monks had not yet relinquished their hope of advancement, and bending to the pressure of the times, the deep plot was veiled under the garb of passive obedience. The most pressing solicitations were despatched to Goa for assistance; and the dauntless Oviedo pledged himself with six hundred staunch Europeans to convert, not only the empire of Abyssinia, but all the countries adjacent.
The scheme, however, did not suit the politics of the day; and in 1560 the bishop received an order from the head of his society to repair forthwith to his more promising charge in Japan. Loth to abandon all his favourite projects of ambition in the country, and utterly reckless of truth, he addressed the most specious letters to the pope, holding out a certain prospect of prostrating the church of Ethiopia before the apostolic throne, whilst to his immediate superior he dilated upon the richness of the land, and the mines of pure gold which he falsely asserted to exist in every province of the kingdom. But his artful motives were thoroughly pierced by the more wily successor of Saint Peter; and vessels soon after arrived on the coast of Africa, to convey the reluctant fathers to the monastery of Saint Xavier, in Goa.