Faith, Religion, and Manners of the Ethiopians
Góis had asked Saga za Ab, and Ethiopian monk stranded in Portugal, to compose an accurate depiction of Ethiopian Christianity, given the inaccuracies present in the Legatio, which drew largely on the accounts of Matthew of Armenia who, though an Ethiopian Christian, was non-native and a layperson. Saga za Ab completed his treatise in 1534, after which Góis translated it to Latin.
The text added a note on the etymology of Prester John as a title referring to the Ethiopian king, suggesting that "Prester" did not refer to "priest" but to "pretiosus," meaning "exalted." However, this is not the title that his subjects themselves used: Ethiopians used the Ge'ez or Amharic equivalents of exalted, being "encoe" and "belul," respectively. Accordingly, the text avers that Ethiopians called their king "Ioannes Belul" or Ioannes Encoe."
Although appreciated by the Erasmus-influenced intellectuals of the time, the text was banned by the Cardinal Infante Dom Henrique, Grand Inquisitor of Portugal for "implicitly advocat[ing] a kind of world-wide confederation of Christians" (Silverberg, 300). Instead of disseminating accurate information about the Ethiopian religion, Portuguese Jesuits returned to the earlier Portuguese imperative to convert Prester John, king of the Ethiopians, to Catholicism.
Still, the text was reprinted in Paris in 1541 and again in Louvain in 1544, and found itself translated into English and other languages. It remain banned in Portugal until 1791.
