AHC: Have Ethiopian Christianity spread into Central Africa

The challenge is to have Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity spread into Central Africa (OTL South Sudan, CAR, the Congos, etc.) because of Ethiopian missionaries or some other form of conversion. The POD must be before the 1880s (when Europe colonized Africa and brought Protestantism and Catholicism to the continent). If you want to do it before the creation of Islam it would also be interesting to see it spread into OTL Somalia or Yemen, but that would be harder.
 
I don't know very well medieval history of Ethiopia but I think that easiest way is butterfly Islam away. Then Ethiopia can operate in Africa without threat of Muslim sultanates. But this too need someone expansionist emperors who can too modernise their nation.

Or then Ethiopia makes pulls "Meiji" and modernise with help of European nations on early 19th century. But I don't know how plausible this is.
 
It might help if the medieval Nubian Christian kingdoms survived, allowing Christianity to spread to the upper Nilotic peoples from two directions. Nubia might actually be a better vector for the spread of Orthodox Christianity than highland Ethiopia: there were considerable geographic and cultural barriers to transmission from the highlands, and IOTL, Ethiopia didn't convert many of the lowland peoples of its own empire.
 

ben0628

Banned
I don't know very well medieval history of Ethiopia but I think that easiest way is butterfly Islam away. Then Ethiopia can operate in Africa without threat of Muslim sultanates.

Agreed. Didn't Axum(predecessor of Ethiopia) attempt to lay siege to and conquer the city Mecca sometime before the creation of Islam??? Would taking out Mecca prevent Islam from being created?? (I personally don't know much about Islam).
 
I think Christianity was pretty widespread in northern Africa prior to the Islamic conquests, so containing Islam would give this a chance to occur. However Ethiopian Orthodox may not be ubiquitous as various branches of Christianity were strong in Africa and may get a foothold central Africa as well as EOC by western coastal and Saharan trade routes.
 
I don't know very well medieval history of Ethiopia but I think that easiest way is butterfly Islam away. Then Ethiopia can operate in Africa without threat of Muslim sultanates. But this too need someone expansionist emperors who can too modernise their nation.

Or then Ethiopia makes pulls "Meiji" and modernise with help of European nations on early 19th century. But I don't know how plausible this is.

But doesn't butterflying away Islam also butterfly away the Schism between the Egyptian and Ethiopian Coptic churches? Or was that before Islam?

Anyways, the clearest way to do it would actually have Ethiopia have an incentive to prosetylse, even within Ethiopia, Orthodox Christians have only ever been a slight majority. Get a king/emperor who is somehow influenced by maybe crusader mentality and vanquishes pagan and Islamic influences within their own territory, and then continues on as a justification for expansion. I'm not sure of a time frame to do this, perhaps there's some kind of anti-Ottoman Portuguese-Ethiopian alliance in the Indian Ocean/Red Sea.
 
The anti-Ottoman alliance is OTL (and probably saved Ethiopia from Adalese conquest). Eventually the alliance broke apart and Ethiopia kicked out all the Jesuits.

Based on my earlier presumption, i decided to do some looking up on the church, and I can already see a flaw in spreading the religion, aside from all our PODs stated. None of us mentioned that until the late 1950s, the Ethiopian church was dictated by the Coptic Patriarch in Alexandria, who had always appointed a Coptic Egyptian as Archbishop of Ethiopia.
So creating a much earlier defined schism would go a long way to make Ethiopia more likely to prosetylse. First of all, a local Patriarch would probably be more concerned with all the heathens and heathen practices around, and could do a lot more to convince the emperor to deal with that problem, much more than a far away foreign patriarch would.
Secondly, if the Coptics had a similar policy to all clergy as they did for archbishops, then the Church may have had an alien element to it, or perhaps only appeared to the upper class. (Similar to Zoroastrianism in Sassanid Persia). Obviously this is mostly speculation due to Ethiopia being quite an obscure subject for most on the website.
However, the POD of a much earlier schism from Alexandria seems logical, hopefully with the Ethiopian Patriarch having large influence on Ethiopian emperors in terms of both internal and external spreading of the religion.
 
Could the Ethiopian Church have a peaceful development toward autocephaly like the Russian Orthodox Church had? How might the Ethiopian Church achieve autocephaly earlier than the 1950s? It seems almost odd that it never did, there must have been a good reason why it didn't.
 
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