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RICHARD GRAY 407 las authorised sending a messenger to Ethiopia, possibly taking advantage of the artisans and technical experts subsequently supplied to Zara Ya'qob by Al– fonso. These early relations between Ethiopia and Europe, rightly described by Taddesse Tamrat as "precarious, but nonetheless continuous", began to replace legend by facts in European minds. They enabled, for instance, Fra Mauro in Venice, subsidised by Alfonso, to incorporate much new information concern– ing the Ethiopian highlands in his Mappamondo (1460). They also laid a firm ba– sis for an enduring interest in the papal curia concerning this potential Christian ally 5 • The first foundations of an increasingly authentic knowledge in Europe of an extensive African Christian kingdom situated beyond Muslim Egypt and, it was thought, commanding the waters of the Nile, had been laid almost entirely as a result of Ethiopian initiatives. It was the Ethiopians who had persistently attempted to improve their contacts with Europe and the papacy. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Ethiopia suddenly began to as– sume an urgent, critical potential strategic interest for the papacy. The immedi– ate results of this interest were to be negligible, but its significance was to en– dure for centuries. Frustrated in its attempts to mobilize, among the Italian states and more widely in Western Europe, a united response to the threats of Turkish expan– sion, the papacy found that at least it could encourage further Portuguese at– tempts to explore the sea route to Ethiopia. The Portuguese crown was given extensive grants of ecclesiastical patronal rights and responsibilities (the Pa– droado) in its overseas possessions and the lands of the "new discoveries". Papal weakness in Europe was mirrored by the decline of royal power in Ethiopia following the death of Zara Ya'qob and the consequent growth of the rival Muslim power of Adal. The hope in Rome of effecting an alliance and even union with these remote African Christians remained slender, but later in the fifteenth century the popes established a hospice for Ethiopian visitors to Rome attached to the church of S. Stefano Maggiore close to St Peter's. 5 Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 264-267. C. M. de Witte, Une ambassade ethiopienne a Rome en 1450, in Orientalia Christiana Periodica 21 (1956) 286-298. Tamrat's argument that Zara Ya'qob's "strong monophysite stand rules out any theological and doctrinal reasons for his envoys calling at the papal court" (p. 265), perhaps surprisingly suggests that the court of Zara Ya'qob had a far clearer view, than western Catholics, of the theological differences which then separated the Ethiopian Orthodox Church from Rome.