Arts et sciences humaines

Centering the façade of the late twelfth/early thirteenth-century hewn church of Beta Maryam (Lalibela, Ethiopia) is a curious window. Consisting of a pair of arched apertures crowned with a quatrefoil oculus, it closely resembles a Gothic tracery window. Rather than seeing this resemblance as coincidental, we understand this form as a conspicuous borrowing of the Gothic style by Ethiopian royalty, likely introduced during a later Medieval restoration of the church complex in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.

This motif did not travel the 5500 kilometers separating Ethiopia from the Île-de-France on its own, however. Rather, we argue that this borrowing of a Gothic form was likely understood in its Ethiopian context as a symbol of Mamluk Egyptian royal iconography. At that time, Gothic spolia—pilfered from Crusader churches—and their local imitations in the form of lancets, oculi, and portals were conspicuously used on the facades of royal buildings in Cairo, the very city where Ethiopian archbishops were appointed and to which numerous diplomatic delegations were dispatched.

As such, we argue that the Gothic window at Lalibela was, in its Ethiopian setting, not incidental. It was perceived as yet another dynastic Mamluk symbol, appropriated by Ethiopian monarchs to legitimize their own authority and to authorize their appropriation of the earlier Lalibela complex for the reigning Solomonic dynasty.