When Dawit was killed fighting in 1540, it was a heroic expedition of four hundred Portuguese volunteers that saved Christian Ethiopia.
“When the news of Prester John reached Manuel, the following spring, he fired off a letter of rejoicing to the pope. In June 1521, the king publicly declared that the destruction of Mecca and the recapture of Jerusalem were in sight. Yet the truth was otherwise. Manuel was as yet unaware that, impressive as Dawit II was in person, he was not the all-conquering king whose golden image had embossed medieval maps. Up close, it was obvious that the Ethiopians were in no position militarily or economically to launch any attack on the Islamic world; on the contrary, they were hemmed in by Muslim enemies. When Dawit was killed fighting in 1540, it was a heroic expedition of four hundred Portuguese volunteers that saved Christian Ethiopia. Like the gradual revelation of the face of the real Prester, the first century of Portuguese discoveries saw a successive stripping away of layers of medieval mythology about the world and the received wisdom of ancient authority—the tales of dog-headed men and birds that could swallow elephants—by the empirical observation of geography, climate, natural history, and cultures that ushered in the early modern age.”
