Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 1.djvu/135

Rh next day after my arrival I was surprised by the visit of my old friend Father Christopher; and, not to detain the reader with useless circumstances, the intelligence of many visits, which I shall comprehend in one, was, that there were many Greeks then in Abyssinia, all of them in great power, and some of them in the first places of the empire; that they corresponded with the patriarch when occasion offered, and, at all times, held him in such respect, that his will, when signified to them, was of the greatest authority, and that obedience was paid to it as to holy writ.

took upon him, with the greatest readiness, to manage the letters, and we digested the plan of them; three copies were made to send separate ways, and an admonitory letter to the whole of the Greeks then in Abyssinia, in form of a bull.

this the patriarch enjoined them as a penance, upon which a kind of jubilee was to follow, that, laying aside their pride and vanity, great sins with which he knew them much infected, and, instead of pretending to put themselves on a footing with me when I should arrive at the court of Abyssinia, they should concur, heart and hand, in serving me; and that, before it could be supposed they had received instructions from me, they should make a declaration before the king, that they were not in condition equal to me, that I was a free citizen of a powerful nation, and servant of a great king; that they were born slaves of the Turk, and, at best, ranked but as would my servants; and that, in fact, one of their countrymen was in that station then with me.