LOBO, JERÓNIMO

Portuguese missionary, travel writer; b. Lisbon, 1595; d. Portugal, 1678. Lobo entered the Society of Jesus in 1609 and was ordained in 1621. He made a dangerous voyage to Goa (1622) and spent the following year completing his theological studies. He began his long missionary work in Ethiopia in 1625; the steps that led to it are necessary as background.

After the Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia, of which Dom Rodrigo de Lima was the head and Francisco Álvares, chaplain, rather close military and ecclesiastical relations between the two Christian nations continued for a century. At first the Portuguese Catholics respected the Ethiopian Eastern rite. Later, however, the Portuguese manifested considerable intolerance, and about 1550, the Jesuits assumed the delicate task of instructing the Ethiopians in "orthodox" Christianity. A Portuguese Jesuit, João Nunes Barreto, was consecrated in Lisbon in 1555 as Patriarch of Ethiopia, but, although other Jesuits reached Ethiopia, he never got farther than Goa, where he died in 1562. Growing Turkish pressure in the Red Sea area made access to Ethiopia increasingly difficult for Western missionaries. Finally, in 1603 Father Pero Páez reinforced the earlier Jesuits. Before Páez's death in 1622, the emperor was baptized.

At Páez's suggestion, Father Afonso Mendes became patriarch of Ethiopia on March 4, 1623, the first such prelate since André de Oviedo, Barreto's successor (1562) who died in Ethiopia in 1580. Mendes set out at once for the East, and Lobo joined him in India. They reached Ethiopia in 1625 and began a fruitful apostolate. The Catholic emperor died in 1632, and the ecclesiastical picture changed at once; in 1634 all the Jesuits were expelled.

Lobo returned to Goa and then went on to report to Madrid and Rome the desperate plight of the Ethiopian mission. He went back to Goa in 1640 and remained there for almost 20 years. He spent the last years of his life in Portugal.

Lobo wrote in Portuguese two unpublished works concerning Ethiopia, one of which, translated into English by Sir Peter Wyche and published in London in 1669, survives in the library of the Royal Society. The other, much more extensive, was lost for many years. A manuscript has recently been discovered, however, and is now being readied for publication. The Abbé Joachim Le Grand translated a different manuscript of this longer work into French (Paris, 1728). Young Samuel Johnson adapted Le Grand's work in his English translation (London, 1735); this early Johnsonian interest in Ethiopia reached full flower in Rasselas (London, 1759).

Bibliography: d. m. lockhart, Father Jeronymo Lobo's Writings concerning Ethiopia, Including Hitherto Unpublished Manuscripts in the Palmella Library (Doctoral diss. unpub. Harvard U. 1958); "'The Fourth Son of the Mighty Emperor': The Ethiopian Background of Johnson's Rasselas," Publications of the Modern Language Associations 78 (1963): 516–528.

[f. m. rogers]