Students of the history of Ethiopian Studies are well acquainted with the figure of Hiob Ludolf in Frankfurt, considered to be the founder of scientific Ethiopian Studies in Europe. Less known is the fact, that he himself was already a follower of an older tradition of Ethiopian Studies in Germany. Before him, the famous Orientalist Athanasius Kirchner (the first, who “deciphered” the hieroglyphs – but wrongly) had learnt Gi’iz and then had caused much amusement among the Ethiopian Catholics at the Ethiopian Seminar in the Vatican, when he tried to speak Gi’iz with them, with his strong German accent. The interest into Ethiopia in Germany especially rose during the times of the reformation. The German reformation movement, which was primarily directed against the supremacy of the pope and the ignorance of the bible’s teachings among both priestry and the population, also took interest into Ethiopia, being another country, which did not recognize the pope. Peter Heyling (1607-1652), a lay missionary from Lübeck, lived at the court starting from 1634, assuming high political posts and translating Gi’iz manuscripts into Amharic. He was a student of Hugo Grotius, the founder of modern international law, who had dreamt of an alliance of all Christian kingdoms of the world.

Among the German Orientalists the most prominent Ethiopianist has been Hiob Ludolf. His encounter with the small Ethiopian community of the Vatican as a young student of Gi’iz (his first informant being the half-Ethiopian priest Antonio d’Andrade) was crucial for his further writings and for Ethiopian Studies in general. Following the invitation of the Duke Ernst I of Saxe-Gotha (1601-1675), his most important linguistic and ethnographical informant, the exiled Catholic priest abba Gorgoryos from Mekane Sillasé in Amhara, travelled to Erfurt in 1652. He stayed with Ludolf at the Duke’s castle Friedenstein for months, laying the foundations for Ludolf’s Historia Aethiopica of 1681 and other works, which can in a way be considered as precursors of modern ethnological research, and his Amharic and Gi’iz word-books. Ludolf was also an influential teacher. Among his most important students were Johann Heinrich Michaelis in Halle, later the editor of a chronicle of Heyling’s life (1724), and Johann Michael Wansleben. The Duke funded a scientific expedition of the latter in 1663, which, however, never reached Ethiopia – but he had at least been quite successful in collecting Ethiopian manuscripts in Egypt (today kept in Paris). In another attempt the Duke, helped by Ludolf, tried to organize an alliance of Christian kingdoms, including Ethiopia, against the Turks, who had invaded the neighbouring Austrian Empire. But the idea of a political alliance came much too early. All attempts of establishing a direct contact through the help of Dutch seafarers stayed fruitless. Christian Ethiopia, however, had started to attract the public’s interest. Dependent on Olfert Dapper’s Umbständliche Beschreibung von Africa (1670), a pioneering work of African geography, the novelist Happel describes Abyssinia positively in his novel Africanische Tarnolast (1689), contrasting it with its “wild neighbours”. In the context of a new philosophical-anthropological discourse in the 18th cent., led by the anthropologist and philosopher Immanuel Kant (who created a modern classification of peoples and “races”, following which Africans were now judged as culturally inferior), Ludolf’s works were crucial for the preservation of a positive image of Ethiopia, in contrast to all other regions of Africa.